On April 11, people from Surrey and Delta declared BC Highways Minister Kevin Falcon's office a "Global Warming Crime Scene" and dumped highway construction sand in front of his office.
The sand was taken from an area of recently bulldozed homes in Surrey's Bridgeview neighbourhood that is being cleared to make way for the South Fraser Perimeter Road, part of the provincial government's Gateway freeway and port expansion scheme.
Bridgeview is a working class neighbourhood at the foot of the Patullo Bridge on the Fraser River. Local residents had attempted to halt the destruction with a week-long blockade of the house demolitions in early March. The area has a history of resisting government attempts at relocation and industrialization.
The Gateway project is harmful to both the local region and the global climate, as such freeway expansion would make it impossible to meet provincial CO2 reduction targets, and starve the public transit system of operating funds.
Home demolitions for the project are scheduled to resume nearby in late 2009/early 2010. The region is set to be on its biggest ever freeway-building binge during the 2010 Olympics, already infamous for Kevin Falcon's Sea-to-Sky Highway project, which resulted in the arrest of 24 protesters at Eagleridge Bluffs, and the death of First Nations elder Harriet Nahanee.
Gateway's new South Fraser Perimeter Road highway is planned to pave directly over several First Nations Sacred Sites on the South Fraser shore, as well as Burns Bog and Surrey Bend, two of the largest urban wilderness areas left in the world.
For more info see http://www.gatewaysucks.org
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