Surprise, surprise: The jewel of Canada’s beautiful Pacific Coast is now to be a commercial port for supertankers carrying tar sands bitumen to the Orient. Did you think the exercise would end otherwise? When the Conservative government makes a mockery of democracy, ignores our environment, chooses the panel and reserves all decisions to itself, did you think there were options? This decision was made two years ago.
And it is still an ugly decision. It is to spend more than $5 billion to build a dual pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia. The smaller diameter pipe is to pump light crude oil up, over the Rockies to Bruderheim where the light crude will be mixed with tar sands bitumen, heated and pumped under high pressure back to Kitimat. In Kitimat, the tar sands slurry will be pumped into tankers and sent on its way to Asia.
“But,” they hasten to tell you, there are conditions. Yes there are. There are many conditions. And all of these conditions will be approved by the government—whose Ministers are dancing in the hallways of Parliament as another leap into tar sands wealth is completed. And it will be the National Energy Board—with headquarters in Calgary—that will decide if the conditions are met. And, oh yes, the Energy Board will decide just how much effort each condition will require.
The news media are cheerfully pointing out that one of the options remaining to Canadians is civil disobedience. They fail to note that one of the conveniences in pipeline laying is that people who throw themselves in front of the trenching machines can be conveniently left in the bottom of the trench and forgotten. And if you wondered why the cost conscious government has not cut the numbers of our men and women in uniform, just try civil disobedience and you will realize that the brutality of the Toronto G20 police action was just a civilian exercise.
And we can hardly count on the greed of British Columbia to help. The B.C. Premier has made it very clear that B.C. can be bought. We all know that all she is doing is haggling over her price.
What is of much greater concern are the stands of federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair. These leaders and their teams will have to be creative and strategic to keep the final decision from being made before the 2015 federal election. That is the only real chance for this pipeline atrocity to be vanquished.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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