One of our favourite progressive bloggers is on the West Coast and he likes to refer to Prime Minister Trudeau as ‘le Dauphin.’ He actually wrote that the Dauphin’s announcement of a $1.5 billion fund to upgrade responses to tanker and oil spills on the Pacific coast was a good start. Start at what?
The Prime Minister actually appears to think that this ‘generous’ plan will make us all amenable to supertankers filled with bitumen plying the waters around Vancouver Island. He thinks that the money will be spent on teaching us how to do a better job at cleaning up spills.
It must have taken Toronto Star pundit Chantal Hébert all of two minutes to figure out the Dauphin was using the announcement to pave the path for the tripling of Kinder-Morgan’s TransMountain pipeline capacity. We are not all gullible here in Ontario. We will be back out there one of these days and we want to find that beautiful City of Vancouver right where we left it.
Reading the announcement of how the $1.5 billion of our tax money is to be spent (over five years) begs the question: “What the hell have we been doing about spills previously?” This is lame.
And who is paying for this program? Does this mean that the tankers carrying the bitumen away from the West Coast get a couple of free spills? How much of this money is being spent to help protect our West Coast? And what is the share required to protect the Arctic and the East Coasts? Who is helping pay the bills there? And God save the Bay of Fundy if TransCanada Pipeline’s Energy East gets approved.
Is exploiting Alberta’s bitumen that important to the Trudeau government? Maybe if the bitumen producers took all the money they are currently spending on television and newspaper advertising, they could spend it on protecting our environment.
But shipping bitumen to countries that cannot afford to be concerned about the environment is hardly the answer. Bitumen is extremely polluting in the process of turning it into artificial crude oil and then further polluting when burnt to create energy. It has far too many strikes against it to be considered for any energy needs.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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