There is not too much confrontation across Canada these days about pipelines to the sea. With real crude oil prices bouncing around $40 to $50 a barrel, there is not much interest in synthetics from the tar sands. We miss the railings of people such as our favourite closet environmentalist Finance Minister Joe Oliver. He was natural resources minister when Canadians were wondering about the excessive pollution caused by converting tar sands to synthetic oil. Joe Oliver kept any concern for the environment in the closet then and he has never let it out.
Instead the Finance Minister was giving speeches earlier this year about the disgraceful use of social license to block big business. What the minister was really saying was that ‘minority rights be damned, there is profit to be made here!’ Earlier this year, the minister actually complained to a friendly audience at a Manning Centre for ‘Building Democracy’ conference that “social license was forcing governments and business to obtain public support for undertakings that impact the environment, aboriginal rights or issues around potential pollution.”
That potential pollution is not just a maybe. It is a when. You hardly have to be an environmentalist to question thousands of kilometres of old pipelines being converted to pushing highly corrosive tar sands bitumen at high temperature and under pressure from Alberta to the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans or to the Gulf of Mexico.
But now the silence is deafening. President Obama has probably delayed his condemnation of the Keystone XL pipeline until after the Canadian election. There is no need for him to be accused of interfering in our election.
The Harper cabinet has already passed the Northern Gateway pipeline approval but nothing can happen on that front that will further infuriate B.C. citizens before the election. And besides, the supposedly unbiased opinion of the Calgary-based National Energy Board that has been approving these pipelines has yet to be tested in the courts.
Meanwhile Joe Oliver has gone to ground. He has even had to cancel his planned love-ins at certain Conservative (men-only) clubs around Toronto. They would have been possible if the media had not found out about them. The more reliable minister of everything political as well as Defence, Jason Kenney, is now feeding the news media the Conservative line on deficits. He speaks a form of Newspeak that only fools fall for.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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