Dear Mr. Hird:

Thank you for your letter of November 24, responding to 
my earlier email on this topic. I offer the following two 
suggestions based upon your response.

Health Standards
 I appreciate that Telus is working within the Industry 
Canada guidelines. Those guidelines are themselves under 
increasing scrutiny, however. For example, the recent 
(November 2010) NRC publication by Levitt and Lai 
surveyed the literature and highlighted the uncertainties. 
Nevertheless, they felt the evidence warranted the 
following recommendation,

"As a general guideline, cell base stations should not be 
located less than 1500 ft (*500 m) from the population, and 
at a height of about 150 ft (*50 m)."

That the slow-moving federal bureaucracy will only act 
slowly, if at all, this does not preclude a socially-responsible 
and nimble corporation from doing so, for the benefit of 
everyone, including its customers and shareholders. 
Exercise of such responsibility means rejecting the Rocky 
Point site.

Alternative Sites 
I was glad to hear that Telus is exploring alternative sites 
which are located further from population centres. I 
understand, however, that all sites so far explored are on 
private property. While a suitable private site might be 
found, a thorough search cannot ignore government sites as 
well.

For example, there are many locations on DND lands  (e.g., 
Mary Hill, Albert Head) which are more than 500 m from 
population concentrations, which have ready all-weather 
access, and which probably have excellent coverage of 
households.  Existing towers on some of these properties 
might even offer potential construction economies.

I would hope that Industry Canada, in reviewing an 
application, would reject any application which did not 
include a sincere evaluation of potential sites on DND (or 
other government) lands.

Yours sincerely

Frank Mitchell
530 Witty Beach Road
Metchosin (Victoria) BC V9C4H8
tel. 250-478-1671 fax. 250-478-1371