Stephen Hume: Enbridge has more than one rogue elephant in its tent
Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines president John Carruthers deserves an A for effort.
His determined forays into the breach regardless of how often his company shoots itself in the public relations foot behind him shows exemplary grit.
Recently he was writing on these pages extolling the economic benefits the proposed $6-billion pipeline would bring to British Columbia’s First Nations if they’d just get on-side.
On offer is a 10-per-cent equity position in the Enbridge plan to move an Exxon Valdez-sized volume of diluted Alberta bitumen and condensate through their territories every two days.
Buying in will bring First Nations adjacent to the right-of-way about $280 million a year over the first 30 years of the project, Carruthers said.
“This is approximately $230,000 per year for most neighbouring communities.”
Come again? A cheque for $230,000 a year is about the same amount Premier Christy Clark was proposing to pay one — yes, ONE — staff member in her office. It’s about what you’d expect to pay the CEO of Enbridge — average remuneration $8 million a year in total compensation — for seven days of work.
Leaving aside the fascinating and occasionally shrill argy-bargy over environmental assessments, clean versus dirty oil, who’s astroturfing, greenwashing and tarring for whom among the cacophony of think tanks, environmental activists, industry spin doctors, climate change bladers and deniers, politicians and their political foes, dangling this kind of financial carrot isn’t likely to move intransigent First Nations much.
And even as Carruthers was citing his figure in The Vancouver Sun, The Canadian Press was citing a base offer to one Alberta band of $70,000 a year — about the price of a new pickup truck.
“Only minimal economic benefits were offered,” the CP report quoted Chief Rose Laboucan, who’s been elected to head the Driftpile Cree Nation’s council six times, as saying.
In fairness, Enbridge spokespersons have been backpedalling furiously. That offer would occur only at the lower end of the scale said one. Just a starting point, said another.
Just a starting point? Well, you can say that again.
Somebody should inform whoever gets the details together for Enbridge executive speeches that First Nations leaders now come equipped with high-powered degrees in law, commerce, social sciences and education — and even those who don’t have such expertise are not stupid, they hire those who do. Kind of the same way the rest of our corporate culture operates.
B.C’s sophisticated First Nations are not likely going to be in the market for what looks like the 21st-century equivalent of beads and blankets. If this pipeline scheme is ever going to fly it’s going to have to sweeten the offer with a lot more scratch and a lot more sensitivity to First Nations’ environmental concerns than the price of a used sailboat or a new pickup truck.
Which is why Brian Lee Crowley, managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — also quoted in the CP story — was quite right when he surmised that the 10-per-cent equity offer is “totally inadequate.”
“You split that up among the dozens of First Nations along the pipeline route and it’s just not enough, in my view, to make the project attractive or to outweigh some of the other objections,” he told the news agency.
Now this isn’t exactly a new position. The Institute has already proposed that Ottawa might woo First Nations participation by offering to designate the pipeline corridor as reserves so they could get a share of the promised $81 billion in tax revenues the project will generate for other governments.
The other rogue elephant in the tent for Carruthers, of course, is that even sweetening the financial pot substantially won’t work without assurances of bombproof environmental safety in super green — but earthquake and flood prone — B.C.
And having just witnessed nature on the rampage in southern Alberta, Enbridge’s own head office out of commission in flooded Calgary and yet more pipeline leaks forcing the company to shut down lines carrying almost a million barrels of oil a day to U.S. markets, that elephant is going to be even harder to ignore.
Access article here: http://www.vancouversun.com/Stephen+Hume+Enbridge+more+than+rogue+elephant+tent/8618392/story.html