Revelstoke city council votes to rescind 1985 policy forbidding nuclear weapons

Photo: Google Guide/ Paulina Pedrero Miranda

Revelstoke council members have decided to rescind a decades-old policy outlawing nuclear weapons from city limits.

The City of Revelstoke’s governance committee is undertaking a municipal policy review, and in its review, found a policy from 1985 that declares the city “will not become a nuclear weapons zone.”

At a Jan. 28 meeting, council members voted in favour of scrapping the policy, which forbade the storage or development of nuclear weapons and urged the federal government to be a leader in disarmament.

Coun. Tim Palmer said the spirit of the policy hearkens back to a trend from the 1970s and 1980s.

“There was a movement amongst local governments in the anti-nuclear environment to have those kind of policies saying we're not going to build nuclear bombs in our community,” he said.

“The policy is arguably one of making political statements that we actually don't have jurisdiction over.”

Coun. Aaron Orlando said when he saw the policy on the meeting agenda, he looked it up on the city’s website.

“Often these were put forward to send an anti-nuclear proliferation message, as well as to avoid being targeted by nuclear weapons by supposedly doing this, whether that had any effect or not… probably not in my opinion,” Orlando said.

The motion to rescind the anti-nuclear policy was passed with only Orlando voting in opposition.