Bluster over bitumen: Politicians eye gains with tough tanker talk
From more than one vantage point, the motion passed in the House of Commons this week to ban oil tankers in the waters off British Columbia’s northern coast seems much ado about nothing.
The federal Conservative government says an existing moratorium was already creating an “exclusion zone” that has been preventing tanker traffic from coming down the Inside Passage for decades.
Meanwhile, Enbridge Inc., the company that wants to send raw bitumen by pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to the port in Kitimat, B.C., to be loaded onto ships and taken to markets in China and India, doesn’t recognize the non-binding motion.
Its executives say they will proceed with the pipeline project regardless of the Commons vote of disapproval, and that it will be up to an ongoing regulatory process involving the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency to determine whether supertankers can safely operate out of the northern marine terminal.
But politics is often more rooted in perception than reality, and political gains can be made by staking out positions that have no real consequential effect.
Nathan Cullen, the New Democrat MP for Skeena-Bulkley Valley who moved the motion, acknowledges that the oil company will not be giving up its fight any time soon.
“Now it moves from the Parliament to the political and the public realm,” he said in an interview this week. “There’s been more than 6,000 people in the past few days who said they want to be active in the campaign and a large number of them – we’re going through the lists now – are in Conservative ridings.”
All of which makes sense for the NDP, which has capitalized on the intense opposition to the tankers that has been expressed by British Columbia’s native communities.
But the motion could not have been approved without the support of the Bloc Québécois, a party whose natural interests lie far from the Pacific coast.
“To have the Bloc come out as well really kind of touched me a little bit here, because we are talking about a group of folks that don’t know us that well,” said Art Sterritt, the executive director of Coastal First Nations.
And it received the support of the Liberals, who have been occasional boosters of the oil sands project that stands to lose out if the tankers cannot land in Kitimat.
In July, 2009, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said: “The stupidest thing you can do [is] to run against an industry that is providing employment for hundreds of thousands of Canadians, and not just in Alberta, but right across the country.”
The Liberals say there is nothing contradictory about supporting both the oil sands and the tanker ban.
“The ecosystem is too fragile and the other livelihoods that could be affected too significant to justify the risk of an oil spill. The ban has been in place since 1972 and everything we have learned since then justifies it being formalized,” said Gerard Kennedy, the Liberal Environment critic.
“We also support responsible and sustainable development of the oil sands, and risky tanker traffic is neither. There are also other routes for oil to be shipped to reach Pacific markets.?”
The Liberals would seem to have little to gain from backing the oil sands in Alberta, where they have been locked out by the Conservatives for many years.
At the same time, they want to keep their seats in British Columbia and win back others. A critic might argue that Mr. Ignatieff, in supporting the tanker ban, is making a play for B.C. votes.
But Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at the University of Victoria, points out that federal issues, including the environment, reverberate with people across Canada, including in Ontario. And as much as the tanker ban is about protecting the waters of British Columbia, the next election will be won or lost in Ontario.
“Can the Liberals bring back the million missing [Ontario] voters from the last election? That’s the real challenge and actually the real question mark that’s hanging over Ignatieff’s leadership,” Dr. Pilon said. “Will he bring those voters back out. Because if he does, it will change everything.”