Kitimat vote sends warning
Of all the towns located along the proposed route for the Northern Gateway pipeline, Kitimat was the most likely to hit an economic bonanza.
To make sure that message hit home, Enbridge launched a massive door-to-door blitz in the town to promote the benefits - a direct $17-million infusion into the local economy and the addition of hundreds of jobs that would keep young people working in the area for generations.
And it must have been clear to Kitimat residents how seriously Ottawa takes the project. The federal government long has made it clear that this project is important to Canada's economic security, because it allows the oilsands industry to expand its customer base to energy-starved Asian economies.
In spite of that, on the weekend almost 60 per cent of Kitimat voters backed a small environmental group's low-budget bid to kill the project rather than vote for their community's and Canada's economic security.
The final decision on the pipeline isn't up to the people of Kitimat but, as the Toronto Star's Tim Harper said in a recent column, there is a deeper message in their willingness to overlook economic security and turn on the federal government over fear of what this project could mean for the environment.
Kitimat is accustomed to environmentally sketchy projects.
The town was built by Alcan in the 1950s and continues to be a heavy-industrial island in B.C.'s northern wilderness. But there was something about the oilsands project that made it appear particularly threatening.
Although the group opposed to the pipeline worried about the possibility of a tanker spilling its cargo in the Douglas Channel, concerns about the continued development of the oilsands extends from the British Columbia coast to Washington to Berlin.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last week released the third in its latest series of reports on climate change, warning that without immediate action by governments, the Earth will warm by an average four degrees by the end of this century.
There is also a growing sense that governments have done more to obstruct meaningful action rather than do what they must to turn things around. The oilsands have become a major international target for those worried about government inaction.
As if to drive that point home, Environment Canada quietly released a report on Friday which suggested that development of the oil and gas sector now has surpassed transportation as Canada's leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.
While the Harper government has promised to use regulations to reduce emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels over the rest of this decade, the report indicates intensity reductions are frozen at 2004 levels. Meanwhile, Ottawa hasn't been able to draft regulations for the oil and gas sector.
Although Ottawa has the final say on the pipeline, if the Kitimat vote is reflective of a growing mistrust in government and industry in Canada, and people's willingness to tip the balance more in favour of the environment than the economy, the political consequence of exercising that final say could be steep.
The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The StarPhoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper's editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.