It’s a strange platform that the Mr. O’Toole is trying to sell us. He will promise anything to voters but he fails to understand that he is pissing off Mother Nature. She has certainly been sending clear signals of her displeasure. We have just spent a summer with the West burning and the East baking in the hot weather. Yet, this amateur does not seem to understand that we are creating the problem.
In fact, Erin O’Toole of the conservatives might be the stupidest political leader in this election. The liberal’s Justin Trudeau and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh might be close behind him but their promises to Mother Nature are, at least, more conciliatory. Trudeau and Singh might both be wrong to support twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline but O’Toole wants to double down by not only finishing the twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline but he wants to build the currently defunct Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat.
And yet O’Toole promises Quebec, no pipelines there. How’s that for hypocrisy?
And what else can O’Toole do to help the recently AWOL premier of Alberta? We all knows that he owes Jason Kenney for helping him win the conservative leadership. It is almost as though Mr. O’Toole does not know what to say, when premier Kenney is not around to tell him what to say.
It is not as though we have a green party that is any sort of alternative. That party is too busy fighting with its leader to pay attention to those of us deeply concerned about how Canada is treating the environment.
The purpose of the twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline is to enable the pipes to carry three times the amount of diluted bitumen, under high pressure, for shipment overseas. The 2015 estimate of the cost of just the twinning was $12.6 billion. Today, it is estimated to exceed $16 billion. And the pipeline cost the government $4.7 billion to begin with.
With an estimated recovery by the federal government over the next 20 years of only about $20 billion, the Trans Mountain project is definitely a losing proposition. There must be far better ways to spend the same money to generate jobs that last and return more to the citizens and their government, in an environment friendlier to Mother Nature.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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