Nation building: how the Enbridge pipeline issue unified Northern B.C.
When I was in Prince Rupert last month, I asked the innkeeper at the Totem Lodge in Prince Rupert if she knew of any people in favour of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline that I could contact for an interview. The Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel can expect a unified response to the hearings that will be held on February 17 and 18 in Prince Rupert.
Jill Spyker gave me a long look, then a definitive “No.”
“No one at all?”
“Every one that I interact with in my daily life sees the short term benefit and the long term disaster,” Spyker said.
“I grew up here. I’m not willing to risk everything for 400 jobs. It’s just wrong.”
Many people think that northern BC has never been so unified, and they thank Enbridge for bringing their community together.
Prince Rupert residents Cam and Annie Thompson were equally definitive. Cam is an RCMP officer, and Annie home-schools their two young children.
“I heard of someone with property to sell who hopes property values will go up,” Annie said after some thought. “But that’s about it.”
Annie thought that the biggest change brought by the proposed pipeline is the way that it has brought communities together. Cam, speaking in his personal capacity, elaborated:
“It has made a tight coalition out of the First Nations and removed a lot of boundaries between First Nation and non-native communities. People are very unified against it.”
Allan Davidson, the Vancouver Regional Representative of the Haida Nation, agreed that the pipeline has unified First Nations. “We’ve had trade relations for thousands of years,” he said. “Now we’re starting to come back together to look at the same big picture.”
KC, maintenance man for a women’s shelter in Massett, saw the proposed pipeline unifying the Haida and non-native communities on Haida Gwaii. “Unification is a process that’s happening here in Hadia Gwaii. We’ve marched around town together at a demonstration we organized last spring. The Haida and everyone else all have a common interest in keeping our place healthy.”
Jen Rice, who sits on the Prince Rupert City Council, stated, “Individuals, commercial and sports fishers and First Nations along the northwest corridor are usually at odds over allocation of fish. But now everyone has checked their baggage at the door. Everyone risks losing wild salmon if the pipeline gets built.”
A stumbling economy
It’s not that people in the North don’t need jobs. They do.
Fishing, which has sustained northern populations since time immemorial, has steadily declined in recent decades. Arnold Nagy, a member of the Haida Nation who has lived his entire life in Prince Rupert, took me on a tour of seven closed down fish processing plants. Nagy states that processing jobs have moved to the south where non-union employees decrease operating costs.
First Nations members in particular are feeling the impact of fewer commercial fishing opportunities. The DFO’s move to area fishing licenses particularly hurt those First Nations fishermen who used to make a living along the entire coast. According to Nagy, many First Nations families lost licenses that had been passed down through the generations. People who live on reserves can’t take out a mortgage against their homes, so it’s hard to raise capital. Families that had fished for generations couldn’t make a living in their immediate area but couldn’t afford licenses in other areas. “People lost the one economic opportunity that they’ve always had,” Nagy said. “All they’ve ever known is the commercial fishing.”
The salmon stocks are less abundant as well. Todd White, a Haida Nation member and representative of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union Caw on Haida Gwaii, suspects DFO wants to actually wipe out the fishery. “If there’s no work left, no jobs, we have nothing left to protect,” he said. “They can do what they want.” Nagy has a similar impression. “Look at what the federal government is doing to DFO with all the cutbacks,” he said. “They’re making it more difficult to do what we haveto do.”
Jen Rice, Prince Rupert councillor, states the economic risk in stark terms: “If you disrupt commercial fishery so that people can’t maintain their boats, you are doing away with the coastal fishery. If First Nations can’t fish, you are contributing to the extinction of people because that is who they are.”
Annie Thompson of Prince Rupert noted, “The same issue of jobs came up in the 70s with a pipeline and it was an easy no. It’s harder now.”
But fishing is still a major economic player in the northern economy. Nagy estimates about 1000 jobs during salmon season at the Canadian Fishing Company processing plant where he works as a millwright. He estimates about 700 licenses for gillnetters and seiners to fish the northern waters, more for the trawlers. There are crab, urchin, shrimp fisheries and clam openings as well. People buy materials and supplies in the town. There are two fish processing plants in Massett, on Haida Gwaii. Tourism and steelhead fishing are other job generators that would be lost in the event of a spill.
“Myself as a tradesman working in the plant year round I make a pretty good living out the fishing industry,” Arnold Nagy said. “If there’s ever a spill, there’s nothing to do but go to the bank and say I’m bankrupt, how do you want to deal with this? Because there’s no way that I’m going to be able to pay the bills.”
Unbelievable jobs
Arnold Nagy attended Enbridge’s Coastal Advisory Board meetings in Terrace in which the company described long term jobs but offered three month apprenticeships. “I sat there and listened to all these promises of beautiful opportunities for the young people, but it didn’t add up. I told them they were giving false hope of an economic future that just isn’t going to be there.”
KC attended a very quiet meeting that Enbridge representatives held in Massett. His take was that peoples’ responses to the promise of clean up jobs in the event of an oil spill were so strong that they were unable to speak.
Nearly everyone I spoke with believes that the skilled jobs will be short term and go to pipeline specialists from Alberta, but it doesn’t matter much anyway. Debbie Landon, who signed up people on Haida Gwaii to testify in front of the Joint Review Panel, said a young Haida man asked how much money Enbridge was going to offer them. “I said, ‘what if it was a billion dollars?’ and his response was, ‘It wouldn’t be worth it, because all it takes is one spill.’”
The Enbridge website reflects the temporary nature of the employment it offers: about 3,500 construction jobs compared to 34 jobs in operational employment.
Oil spills: “Not 'if', but a matter of 'when'"
The united opposition to the proposed pipeline arises from the shared opinion that a spill is inevitable. “We’re trying to grow this idea that the fisheries have to be sustainable,” Annie Thompson said. “But a spill would wipe it out. It’s not a question of ‘if.’ It’s a matter of ‘when.’”
Allan Davidson of the Haida Nation said, “It might not happen in our generation. It could happen in our kids’ generation. But it will happen.”
People think the pipeline would doom the fisheries whether a spill of occurred at a rupture to the pipeline as in Michigan, or from a tanker running aground, as in Alaska. Arnie Nagy described it this way: “If you have an accident on the pipeline in those stretches where it goes over and under Skeena River tributaries, the oil will end up in the Skeena River and come all the way down here to Prince Rupert. Fish from the Nass and Fraser Rivers all migrate along the coast before they head out to the ocean to do their loop out there. Then they head back down along the Aleutians all the way down from Alaska back here again. They’ll all be affected by any oil that washes down the river to the ocean.”
Nagy continued, “It’s being sold as not a big deal, but if you’ve ever seen how the Skeena River flows sometimes, you have to ask how anyone could ever contain the bitumen and all of the other contaminants mixed in with it from coming down the river. There’s no way. Any spill along the pipeline is basically the end to our commercial fishery here.”
Gerald Amos of the Haisla First Nation said, “If a pipeline burst in the headwaters of the Kitimat River or any rivers where the pipeline will cross, there’s absolutely no way they could get to it, no way they could fly a helicopter in this weather up to that site. How are they going to stop the flow? They stopped cleaning up the one in Michigan during the winter and that’s flat, slow moving water compared to our area. Look out at that snowstorm right now. Up in the mountains, it’s socked in. There’s no way a human being can get in there in and survive. “
KC, of Haida Gwaii, described winter weather conditions at sea: “Extreme conditions get set up by the shallow waters and hurricane force winds we get for a week on end sometimes, 100 km/hour or better. The water gets shallower as you go north from Queen Charlotte Sound. That creates steep waves; they run straight up and down. Most boats don’t leave Haida Gwaii after the end of September or early October. That’s just always been the rule of thumb. After that, you take your chances because the gales and storms come furious. The storms come out of the south east and blow right up the Douglas Channel, which has a lot of corners to it. Remember that ferry we lost a few years ago? A computer can’t steer through those storm conditions. There’s no room to maneuver.”
April Churchill, Vice President of the Haida Nation, said, “The waters here are treacherous. People get stuck here all the time. The ferries don’t run, the planes turn back. If there were a spill, they wouldn’t be able to get the boats out for rescue or clean up. It would be a mess.”
Lessons from the Exxon Valdez oil spill
Nearly all the northerners I spoke with referred to the 1989 oil spill caused by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, the worst environmental disaster in history prior to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Immediate impacts were loss of tourism (over 26,000 jobs and over $2.4 billion in sales) and closure of the salmon, herring, crab, shrimp, rockfish and sablefish fisheries. Over 2,000 Native Alaskans and 13,000 other subsistence permit holders lost their source of food, a fact which causes financial and cultural hardship to this day. Cordova, a small fishing-dependent community, became reliant on Exxon’s money for its survival. The value of commercial fishing licenses plummeted. The impact of big settlement money on small communities took a social toll. Numerous studies have explored the devastating mental impacts of the spill on local residents.
Tourism hasn’t fully recovered, nor have ten of the species taken in commercial fisheries. Herring and salmon stocks never rebounded at all. Oil compromises the immune system of adult herring, even exposure to very low concentrations. This leads to viral disease. Salmon eggs absorb polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) even when they are present in undetectable amounts. PAHs kill the young fry. Even many years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the oil buried under the gravel gets carried to the streams with the ebb and flow of the tides and harms the salmon populations.
Immediate loss of wildlife after the spill was estimated to be about 250,000 sea birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 orcas. Recent studies show that sea otters, who dig pits into the contaminated gravel in search of clams and other prey, are not recovering. Remaining contamination may be affecting the recovery of other species as well. The local pod of orcas has never rebounded and is expected to eventually die out. Surveys have found oil lingering over 450 miles away from the spill site.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, a spill the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster would likely prove equally devastating today because measures for spill prevention and safety and response and recovery have not substantially improved: “To date, no improvements have been made that significantly improve the effectiveness of methods, tools and equipment for containing or removing spilled oil from frigid, dangerous waters. Most oil response technology is tested in more temperate climates. Until it is fully deployed in the Arctic, nobody really knows whether or how it will operate in extreme weather conditions.”
Nor has there ever been a large spill of bitumen, which is much heavier and more tenacious than oil. The toxic condensate that makes bitumen viscous enough to flow may also impact marine wildlife.
April Churchill, Vice President of the Haida Nation, pointed out the failure to clean up the oil from the BC ferry that sank near Hartley Bay. “It’s still sitting there leaking , contaminating their food source. A 15% clean up of my house is not a clean house.”
Building a Salmon Nation
Cam Thompson, RCMP officer speaking in his personal capacity, finds offensive the Federal Government’s support for the pipeline. “I’ve lived in the North my whole life and I’ve never seen a more blatant example of how out of touch they are about what’s really happening here,” he said. “The comments out of Ottawa make you realize how dysfunctional this entire scenario is.”
In response to the Harper governments comments about “nation building” and “enemies of the state,” Arnold Nagy said, “All that they’ve been doing and saying is strengthening the resolve of people to stand up and let their opposition be known in an even louder voice. They unified the fight to protect our coast and it’s something to see. I’m really proud of it because there’s no racial barriers in it. The respect toward First Nations from non-natives when they’re on their traditional territories is something I’ve never seen before.”
Nagy continued, “If Harper wants to say I’m a radical you’re damn right I’m a radical, because I have something to protect. I have a future. The fisheries have provided a great living for me. I want my family and future generations of our family to be able to make a living off the same thing I did.”
Nathan Cullen, MP for the Skeena-Bulkley Valley and NDP leadership candidate, thinks the Federal Government helped unify the North with its tactics. “The Federal Government lost people’s confidence by calling everyone who opposes the pipeline a radical and by saying the pipeline must go ahead. They acted on the worst advice I’ve ever seen. People aren’t willing to sacrifice a way of life to a bully. The First Nations in particular have seen bullying before. If Harper wants to make this issue a referendum on his leadership, we welcome the fight.”
n February, 2,000 people peacefully marched the streets of Prince Rupert in opposition to the proposed Enbridge pipeline and in support of an economy based on clean and renewable resources. Jen Rice, Prince Rupert City Councillor, described it as follows:
“In my 10 years living in Rupert I don't rink I've seen anything like this. The rally was peaceful, inspiring and uplifting for our souls. There were ladies from the Senior Centre marching and young families -- A cross section of the population amongst our First Nations. There’s no way all of us are the fringe group we've been made out to be.”
Allan Davidson of the Haida Nation said, “We’re not getting much coverage in the media on the Haida Nation perspective. The Minister of Natural Resources point blank called people who are against the pipeline “radicals,” so I guess I’m a radical. But people really need to understand the reason why we’re opposed to it. We have a huge responsibility to the younger generation to protect our coast.”