With parliament paused for summer recess and the prime minister off, playing with prime ministers and presidents in foreign climes, we hear more bad news about our government’s favourite pipeline. It seems that the parliamentary budget office is now estimating the value of the Trans Mountain pipeline at minus $600,000,000. I am not exactly sure how you get rid of something of negative value. Is that what you have to pay someone to shut it down?
When this fiasco started, Justin Trudeau announced that the pipeline only cost Canadians $4.5 billion. The plan was to double the present pipeline and increase the capacity from 300,000 barrels per day by almost three times by adding heaters and higher pressure for a capacity of 890,000 barrels per day. And this grandiose plan was only going to cost an additional $12 billion. It is expected to be completed in the late summer of 2023 at a final cost of around $22 billion.
While the prime minister is away, the office of his deputy prime minister swung into action with a release claiming that two of Canada’s major banks (BMO and TD) consider the planned expansion to be commercially viable. These two banks, that claim they are conscientious about the environment, made no mention of the environmental consequences of the millions of tons of tar sands bitumen that would have to be shipped through the finished pipeline, to make it commercially viable.
It has never ceased to amaze this writer that our prime minister, his deputy prime minister and our minister of the environment all seem to ignore the consequences of this action. You can hardly send that much greenhouse gas emissions to off-shore refineries and not be responsible for the accelerated destruction of our world.
Last thing we heard on saving the planet was that we were going to meet some target in 2030. That is eight years away. Many of us are curious what the Trudeau government is doing now?
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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