You would think that Canadians would be tired of it. Every time you buy gas at your local gas station you are being ripped off. And yet the other day one of Canada’s major refinery executives compounded the abuse we are taking.
Mark Sherman, chief operating officer for Irving Oil told Global News that the company needed the Energy East pipeline from Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick to process pipeline content for Canadian consumption. He was complaining about further environmental assessments holding up the pipeline completion.
The guy who runs Irving Oil actually said that the pipeline is as important to Canada as the Trans-Canada Highway or the first national railway. He ignored the comment from the interviewer that the Energy East pipeline is designed for the shipment of bitumen. He refers to it as crude oil. That is an outright lie. Bitumen can only be converted to synthetic oil at the cost of extreme levels of pollution.
But Sherman also lied about the marine export terminal that Irving Oil has offered to build for the Energy East pipeline. The strategy is that Irving would off-load American, Arabian, Norwegian or Venezuelan crude from tankers at Saint John and then send them off full of bitumen for processing in third world countries that do not care about the pollution. This is the first time an Irving executive has suggested that Irving wanted to process any of the bitumen. What the refinery would do with the tons of bitumen slag left over from processing bitumen, Sherman did not say.
This is a serious change of stance by the Irving interests as up until now the company had stayed out of the Energy East controversy.
This must be part of being in the Canadian cartel that rips off Canadians by their gross manipulation of the prices of refined oil products. When it is announced on the radio that there will be a two or three cent rise in the price of a litre of gas and all the gas stations in your area raise their prices, you know something is rotten. It also says a great deal about government’s concern for the consumer.
But nobody needs to take up a collection for the offspring of K.C. Irving. This was the man who took billions out of the fragile Atlantic provinces’ economies and left a will saying that his sons could only have the money if they left New Brunswick and stopped paying Canadian taxes.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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