B.C. pipeline follies
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
It seems like only yesterday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was talking about the Great Northern Gateway to Energy Prosperity in China the way prime minister Wilfrid Laurier used to talk about his vision for a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway to the Northwest Coast back in 1903.
Here’s what it’s come to.
Every time there’s some minor oil pipeline fracture in Outer Boondocks, Arkansas, the Ottawa press gallery chases Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver up and down staircases until he agrees to look directly into the camera and speak clearly into the microphone and explain why, miraculously, bad things just can’t happen in Canada.
The great national energy superpower journey that Prime Minister Harper shanghaied everyone into embarking upon two years ago has turned into a voyage of the damned. It is probably not the prime minister’s fault, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody even wants to talk about it anymore. It’s no wonder.
You have to picture the scene. It’s almost the precise midway point between the May 2011 federal election that gave the Harper Conservatives their first majority government and the October, 2015 expiry date mandated by the Canada Elections Act, and there’s Calamity Joe Oliver, standing on a platform overlooking Vancouver harbour.
It’s a press conference. Oliver is there with Transport Minister Denis Lebel. There is a flotilla of oil-spill-response ships floating in the background. It’s a nice day. Oliver takes the lead in announcing a brand new “world-class tanker safety system” with eight new “tanker safety measures” and the unveiling of something called the “Safeguarding Canada’s Seas and Skies Act.”
It all sounds so impressive until everyone notices the bit about requirements that tankers be double-hulled, for instance (which sounds ultrasafe, but isn’t) actually comes from amendments to the Canada Shipping Act from 1993 that set in motion a phasing-out of single-hulled tankers in Canadian waters by 2015. And the Safeguarding Canada’s Seas and Skies Act contains nothing relevant except minor amendments to bring Canadian law in line with a three-year-old international convention that deals with compensation and liability — after an oil spill occurs.
That would have been embarrassing enough but for the Coast Guard unions’ report that the Burrard Cleaner 9, the largest oil-spill response vessel conscripted for Oliver’s media show, had taken something between eight and 11 hours to arrive in Vancouver harbour from its base in far-off Esquimalt, and the vessel showed up only after running aground on a sandbar and allegedly coming into dangerously “close quarters” with a ferry.
To understand just how painfully absurd all this was, it helps to know that oil tanker traffic in Vancouver harbour — which absolutely nobody in Vancouver wants to begin with — has quadrupled from 20 ships a year since 2005, and the new Kinder Morgan pipeline that Oliver was chatting up is intended to bring enough bitumen to the harbour to triple oil tanker traffic.
But wait. It gets better.
The federal government had just shuttered the Kitsilano Coast Guard Station, a venerable Vancouver maritime institution that was handling roughly 350 search and rescue operations annually. Its operations are to be shifted out to a Coast Guard base 17 nautical miles away on the Fraser River. The decision was about as politically smart as setting up Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in front of the totem poles in Stanley Park to announce that the sea otters at the Vancouver Aquarium were to be poisoned.
And let’s not forget about The Indian Whisperer. This is the name some of the more clever wags in Indian country have decided to give Douglas Eyford, a Vancouver lawyer and federal land claims negotiator whose appointment as “Special Federal Representative on West Coast Energy Infrastructure” Oliver announced March 19.
“The Government of Canada must and will make every effort to ensure that aboriginal peoples in Canada have the opportunity to share the benefits of energy resource development in the years ahead,” Oliver said in announcing Eyford’s posting. “We will work with aboriginal communities to ensure they have an opportunity to actively participate in developing Canada’s energy resources and protecting our environment.”
Well, thanks a lot, B.C.’s First Nations leaders said, adding, for the umpteenth time, that under no circumstances would they accept an Enbridge Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline that would traverse more than 1,000 salmon streams before disgorging itself at Kitimat into awaiting supertankers, more than 200 or more of them a year, each roughly the size of the Empire State Building, to carry the stuff out into some of the richest fishing grounds on Earth.
B.C.’s provincial Liberal government isn’t much impressed either, and they’re going to lose the election next month to the New Democrats who have vowed to stop the Enbridge pipeline, period, by whatever means is available.
It could yet be that somehow, Barack Obama’s White House will find a way to approve TransCanada’s wildly contentious Keystone pipeline from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. It even seems actually likely that the TransCanada’s eminently sensible Energy East pipeline will be pumping Albertan bitumen to refineries in New Brunswick by 2017. What you’re hearing is the sound of happy Maritimers.
But out west, where Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were born, all you can hear these days is the sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Alberta, and in British Columbia it’s mostly just the sound of people laughing at Joe Oliver.
Access article here: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/pipeline+follies/8191101/story.html#ixzz2PWdEEVCl