Read this column from Vaughn Palmer, suggesting the revelation of a secret visit BC Premier Christy Clark paid to her Alberta counterpart Alison Redford on the Enbridge pipeline reinforces her reputation for indecisiveness. Clark’s “fence-sitting” on the proposed Enbridge pipeline has been “incredibly frustrating”, says Redford. (July 20, 2012)
VICTORIA – For a premier who promised that openness would be one of the watchwords of her administration, Christy Clark cannot have been happy with the front-page story in the Edmonton Journal Friday.
“Why the need for secrecy?” asked the headline atop a piece by columnist Graham Thomson on Clark’s unannounced visit to Alberta Premier Alison Redford to discuss the running controversy over the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway oil pipeline.
The details were embarrassing enough. Clark’s office asking Redford to keep the visit secret. The B.C. premier ducking in and out of a side door to avoid the cameras. The bait-and-switch ruse with two SUVs to throw reporters off the track.
But while Clark was avoiding the media Thursday, Redford volunteered an account of the meeting that was far from flattering to her visitor from B.C. The Alberta premier professed a reluctance to put words into Clark’s mouth even as she proceeded to do just that.
“She feels right now … a fair amount of pressure to be making comment with respect to this,” said Redford, referencing the pipeline. “A lot of what I think she wanted to chat about today was her ongoing concern as the premier of B.C. with respect to what’s going on with Enbridge and what her thinking is about that. She wants to make sure that she’s holding them to some pretty strict environmental standards.”
Not content to provide a summary of her B.C. counterpart’s concerns — consultations with first nations and making sure there were stringent protocols to deal with spills — Redford then proceeded to offer some “if I were in her shoes” advice.
“I would be trying to set in place a set of conditions that from my perspective would allow the project to go ahead but that would work with industry, not just Enbridge but other companies that are looking at pipelines in B.C., to try to come up with a framework that makes sense to let that investment come into the province. And I think she’s sorting that out.”
Redford framed her disappointment with Clark — “it’s incredibly frustrating to me” — as having arisen out of the B.C. government’s continued fence-sitting on the pipeline. But I have to think those frustrations were also conditioned by Clark’s recent critical comments about Enbridge.
For Clark is sounding increasingly hostile to the proposal, a point that she reinforced in an interview this week with Jason Fekete of Postmedia News: “Based on what we know now, I don’t think British Columbians think the balance of risks and benefits is an acceptable one.”
Check out this video news story from CTV on the Harper Government’s decision to ignore the damning report out of the US on Enbridge’s poor pipeline safety record. Environment Minister Peter Kent maintains his government’s support for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline is unchanged as the company is roundly criticized for is disastrous spill into the Kalamazoo River in 2012 – even though he acknowledges he hasn’t read the report in question. (July 18)
VANCOUVER — A scathing report out of the United States that criticized just about every aspect of Enbridge Inc.’s response to a pipeline spill in Michigan won’t change the Canadian government’s support for the company’s proposed Northern Gateway project, the federal environment minister said.
A report by U.S. investigators released last week concluded Enbridge (TSX:ENB) bungled its response when millions of litres of oil began to pour in and around the Kalamazoo River in July 2010, comparing the company’s handling of the spill to the “Keystone Kops.”
The report has provided fuel for critics of Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway project, which would carry crude oil along 1,170 kilometres of pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia’s coast. Even B.C.’s premier has demanded answers.
But the report won’t change the opinion of the federal Conservative government, which has hailed the Northern Gateway pipeline as important for the country, said Environment Minister Peter Kent.
“Pipelines are still, by far, the safest way to transport petrochemicals in any form,” Kent said in an interview Wednesday.
Kent said he had yet to read the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board report.
Check out this new 3 min video from Pacific Wild and Damien Gillis, featuring NHL Hall of Fame goaltender Mike Richter sharing his once-in-a-lifetime experience in Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest – threatened by the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline and supertankers. The video is the first in a new series titled, “Voices for an Oil-Free Coast”
Check out this video news story from CTV on the discovery this week of piscine reovirus – a pathogen believed to cause the deadly Heart and Skeletal Muscular Inflammation in farmed and wild salmon – by SFU researchers in wild Cultus Lake trout. (July 19, 2012)
Read this editorial by Don Braid in the Calgary Herald remarking on the similarities between Federal NDP and Official Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair’s position Canadian oil policy and more traditional Progressive Conservatives like former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed. (July 13, 2012)
CALGARY — Watching NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair at work here in Stampede city, you might expect a few similar politicians to spring to mind. (Maybe Lenin? Strictly for the beard, of course, not the ideology.)
The ones who occur to me most readily, though, are Alberta conservatives, because they’ve often sounded so much like the federal NDP leader when he talks about the energy industry.
Peter Lougheed, for instance.
Only last fall the revered ex-premier came out against the Keystone XL Pipeline, saying it would ship jobs out of Alberta.
“We should be refining the bitumen in Alberta and we should make it public policy in the province,” Lougheed said. “That would be a better thing to do than merely send the raw bitumen down the pipeline and they refine it in Texas. That means thousands of new jobs in Texas.”
Mulcair made much the same pitch Thursday, but for the whole country, not just Alberta.
He said he wants more refineries built to create jobs. He favours reversing pipelines to ship oil eastward. He opposed closing a Shell refinery in Montreal because he wants western oil refined there.
Lougheed would surely blow his venerated stack if I push this parallel too far; and to be sure, there are differences.
Lougheed always opposed Ottawa’s efforts to force Alberta to “ship jobs down the pipeline to Sarnia.”
In the days before free trade, the debate over jobs and oil revenues was purely internal. That has faded with new markets and the immense revenues they generate.
But today Thomas Mulcair and Peter Lougheed clearly agree on the folly of sending vast quantities of oil abroad.
Next, Mulcair sounded very much like former Premier Ed Stelmach.
One of Ed’s favourite lines was: “I’ve always said shipping raw bitumen out of our province is comparable to selling the topsoil on a farm.”
Stelmach created the Bitumen Royalty in Kind program, which allows energy companies to pay their royalties to government in black goo rather than cash. Ultimately, the government’s bitumen is used as feedstock to supply new upgraders on favourable terms.
It was a good idea that has not yet been a grand success.
Check out it this video news story from Global TV on a new report from the Wilderness Committee that highlights the risks to Stanley Park from an oil tanker spill connected with Kinder Morgan’s proposed twinning of the Trans Mountain. (July 11)
Animation of acoustic impacts on whales (Oceans Initiative)
by Julie Andreyev
Scientist Rob Williams is concerned about the Enbridge, Kinder Morgan and Vancouver Airport proposals that will increase tanker traffic along BC’s coast.
It’s a gray day in Knight Inlet, B.C. The calm silver surface of the water occasionally breaks with the fin of a dolphin. Dr. Rob Williams, marine conservation biologist, alumnus of UBC and head of Oceans Initiative, is helping PhD student Erin Ashe to count Pacific white-sided dolphins as they swim by. With the boat engine turned off, they are listening for orcas. They hear a sound — in the air — not over the hydrophone. It sounds like a storm coming.
Williams pulls in the hydrophone and gets ready to head home before the rainstorm hits. He looks around. The boat is surrounded by a solid school, hundreds of dolphins, storming by at top speed like horses galloping. Out of the corner of his eye he spots the dorsal fins of orcas. Over the course of a half an hour the orcas herd the dolphins into the bay, closer and closer to the shore. In a panic the dolphins leap to get out of the way of the whales. The largest male orca breaches the water aiming for a dolphin, striking it. Stunned, the smaller animal floats motionless in the water while the whale comes back around.
Williams has researched the local dolphin, orca and other at-risk marine mammals since 1995. “You forget what extraordinary wild animals the orcas are, what extraordinary animals the dolphins are, and how they live their lives. And, of course, their lives depend on being able to hear signals — like an orca is coming. That reminds us how important it is to keep the ocean as quiet as possible so that they can hear what they need to hear.”
Currently a Marie Curie Research Fellow at University of St Andrews in Scotland, Williams spends half the year doing field studies and conducting research off B.C.’s coast, and the other half in a university setting. He is concerned about the recent proposals for increased oil and fuel shipping in and out of B.C. “The orca populations off Vancouver Island are listed in the Species at Risk Act. The populations off the south coast of Vancouver Island are in worse shape,” says Williams. More ship traffic could have a disastrous effect on these and other threatened whale populations.
In 2008, Williams and Ashe partnered with Dr. Chris Clark at Cornell University to conduct an ambitious study of ocean noise from ships operating in B.C. coastal waters. Ship noise affects dolphins and whales that rely on sound to communicate, detect prey and avoid the ships themselves. Threatened humpback, blue, killer and fin whales are at risk of death by ship strike, and all marine mammals are threatened if there is a catastrophic oil spill.
Sound is the key sense for dolphins and whales to find their way around, detect predators, find food and communicate. The sound frequency range within which whales communicate and echolocate corresponds to the frequency range of ship noise. Ships hundreds and even thousands of miles away interfere with the acoustic space of these animals. With more ship traffic, the ability for whales and dolphins to communicate, search for prey, and avoid predators will be compromised.
“Mind-bending” is how Dr. Peter Tyack, formerly Senior Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and now a professor at the University of St. Andrews, describes the distance that sound travels through the oceans. He cites a study where sound released underwater in the southern Indian Ocean could be heard in Bermuda and Monterey, California, thousands of miles away. Whales use sound for communication, sometimes over a thousand kilometers. “Marine mammals have evolved over the last tens of millions of years ways to depend on sound to both explore their world and stay in touch with one another… In this frequency range where whales communicate, the main source globally in the planet for noise comes from human ships. The effective range of communication [between whales] goes from a thousand kilometers to ten kilometers,” says Tyack. “If this signal is used by males and females to find each other for mating, imagine the impact this could have on the recovery rate of endangered populations.”
In the presence of ships and ship noise, whales have to expend more energy to find food, and they have to change their calls to use higher frequency sound and increased volume. If a whale can’t find food because of ship noise, his survival may be threatened; if a mother can’t hear and locate her calf, they risk being separated and the calf killed by predators; if whales can’t hear each other to locate mates, their population recovery is in jeopardy; if dolphins can’t hear approaching orcas, they can become prey.
On July 25, 2009, The Sapphire Princess, a massive cruise ship owned by Princess Cruise Lines, headed into the Port of Vancouver. The crew and holidaying passengers were unaware that the body of a 70 ft. long female fin whale was wrapped around the ship’s bow. It had been there probably since the ship toured the area between Alaska and Vancouver Island.
The fin whale, after the blue whale, is the earth’s largest living animal and is listed as “protected” by the International Whaling Commission and “endangered” by the World Conservation Union. Hits can result in external and internal injuries, suffering and drawn-out deaths. Williams has conducted studies of ship strikes that have injured or mortally wounded whales. The areas with highest risk for ship strikes with humpback and fin whales (Dixon Entrance, north North Haida Gwaii Islands, Hecate Strait) correspond to areas where the proposed Enbridge ship traffic would occur.
Propeller wounds on orcas are relatively common and the highest risk area for them is Johnstone Strait. “Port expansion and a proposed pipeline for carrying oil from Alberta to BC’s north coast (with associated oil tanker traffic) would increase ship strike risk for all three species,” says Williams. South from Kitimat through Hecate Strait, Johnstone Strait and around the southern tip of Vancouver Island have areas where whales and ships overlap. The sound of ships in the same area where whales are feeding is believed to cause the whales to be disoriented, which could increase the risk of potential strikes. Williams believes that “the few known cases of collisions involving fin whales suggest that mortality due to ship strike for this species may already be approaching or even exceeding sustainable mortality limits.”
At noon on August 20, 2007, a Ted Leroy Trucking Ltd. barge moving fuel and heavy equipment listed and drifted into Johnstone Strait’s Robson Bight Ecological Reserve. The barge tipped over, losing to the sea its cargo of eleven vehicles and a fuel truck loaded with 10,000 L of diesel fuel. The resulting spill affected 62 square kilometers of marine environment. The slick on the surface of the water persisted for days until it dispersed into the larger body of water. “All the oceanographic factors that help concentrate salmon into a bottleneck area, such as narrow areas in Johnson Strait, will attract orcas,” says Williams. In fact, during the days of the barge spill, scientists estimated that 25% of the threatened northern resident orca (NRKW) population was seen within its vicinity. “Oil spills have been identified as posing a threat to the recovery of transient and resident orcas, and this proposed [Enbridge] pipeline and associated tanker traffic are expected to increase oil spill risk substantially.”
During Williams’ field studies he found that “67% of the NRKW population was found to have visited the area of Robson Bight – Michael Bigg Ecological Reserve on one ‘superpod’ day, which makes this population highly vulnerable to extinction due to stochastic, catastrophic events.” The southern resident population off southern Vancouver Island is composed of only three family groups, and it is common to have 100% of the small population travelling together in Haro Strait. An oil spill could easily affect the entire population.
The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 caused losses of up to 41% to two groups of orcas that have yet to recover to pre-spill numbers. As large as the Exxon Valdez, Panamax-class vessels are the type that would service Richmond. The Burnaby expansion would use the larger Suezmax tankers that carry nearly 1 million barrels of oil. Even larger VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) tankers – bearing up to 2 million barrels of diluted bitumen – would set sail from Enbridge’s port at Kitimat. If a significant number of whales in a threatened whale population were directly affected by another spill, losses to the population could be potentially beyond recovery.
Says Williams, “Any time you have an increase in ship traffic there is risk to dolphins and whales. In the worst-case scenario you could have a spill. Even in the best of circumstances ships make a lot of noise and whales rely on sound. Whales are at risk of ship strikes. In whale populations that are recovering their numbers from whaling, we have to be concerned about these factors. Underwater noise should definitely be one of the factors we consider when assessing the environmental impacts of industrial development applications.”
Julie Andreyev is a new media artist (video/audio/interactive) who teaches at Emily Carr University.
Read this story in TheTyee.ca by Andrew Nikiforuk on the big pay raises Enbridge executives received following the most costly pipeline spill in North American history. (July 12, 2012)
Just months after Enbridge caused the costliest onshore pipeline spill in U.S. history, the board of directors for Calgary-based Enbridge rewarded senior executives with pay raises in 2010.
According to Enbridge’s 2011 “management information circular” the company’s 12 directors voted to raise their own annual retainers by $30,000 and increased compensation for CEO and president Patrick Daniel from $6 million to $8.1 million in 2010.
Stephen J. Wouri, president of liquid pipelines, also saw his income increase from $1.9 million to $2.7 million in 2010. In fact all executives received substantial raises.
Earlier in 2010, on July 25, an Enbridge pipeline carrying diluted bitumen ruptured, pouring the toxic mixture for 17 hours into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall township in Michigan. The two-year clean-up has cost $800 million.
“The Marshall incident was factored into the 2010 short-term incentive awards for all of the named executives,” said the circular.
A year after the disaster the Enbridge board again upped compensation for five senior executives under a short term incentive program that increased their pay by “$4,571,730 including $2,396,000 to the president and chief executive officer.” The company says that it has a “pay for performance philosophy.”
‘Failure’ by Enbridge management cited by US investigators
An investigation of the July 2010 spill released Tuesday by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that corporate neglect fueled by a “culture of deviance” on safety issues at Enbridge caused an “organizational accident” that was preventable.
The NTSB, an independent federal agency that studies the causes of accidents, said that weak and underfunded pipeline regulators played a role in the spill too.
The company’s response to the pipeline rupture from the control room to spill containment was so chaotic and unfocused that the NTSB chair Deborah Hersman compared Enbridge’s negligence to the bungling of the Keystone Cops.
Read this story from Fort St. John’s Alaska Highway News on this year’s “Paddle for the Peace”, in which hundreds are expected to take part in opposition to the proposed Site C Dam. (July 12, 2012)
Hundreds will canoe down the Peace River on Saturday.
Some are coming to show their opposition to Site C, such as David Suzuki, while others simply want to enjoy the natural serenity of the river.
“Originally it was started seven years ago because we just wanted to bring the community to the river,” said organizer Danielle Yeoman. “We thought it was a good way to bring people…(to canoe) on the river.
“The river is for everyone,” she said.
The event is organized by the Peace Valley Environmental Association (PVEA) and the West Moberly First Nations.
“The PVEA’s sole purpose is to stop Site C; that’s why the organization was created,” said Yeoman. “However, it (was) on the back burners, and so truly, when we started this, it wasn’t to do what we’re doing now.
“Now we are actively, obviously, trying to stop Site C again,” she said.
Site C is a controversial project that would see BC Hydro build a third dam on the Peace River to produce power to accommodate future energy needs for this growing province, according to BC Hydro.
Yeoman said that though the PVEA’s intent is to stop Site C, the event is truly about celebrating the river.
“Everyone is welcome,” she said. “In fact, we’d like people that are pro-Site C to come because it usually takes tow minutes to convert them if they’re sitting on the fence.”
She noted that Suzuki “supports” their cause.
“Everybody just thinks he’s a tree hugger – well, he’s that too – but he’s wise,” she said. “He’s only kept a handful of things he wants to fight and Site C is one of them.”
Yeoman noted that Suzuki has been up here on the Peace in the past, and she’s excited for him to speak.
“One of the things that’s really important, since Site C resurfaced three or four years ago, we didn’t have anybody on our side,” she said.
She noted that having people like Suzuki, The Wilderness Committee and others join PVEA’s cause has been positive.
“They’re coming up and they’re actively fighting Site C too,” she said.
She noted that the event has grown steadily since it began seven years ago.
Read this column from Vaughan Palmer in The Vancouver Sun on Enbridge’s sinking chances at building its proposed Northern Gateway pipelines following a damning report from US regulators on its 2010 spill into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. (July 11, 2012)
Opposition leader Adrian Dix was quick to make political hay Tuesday out of a U.S. regulator’s finding that Enbridge officials responded like the “Keystone Kops” to a spill from one of their oil pipelines.
What happened south of the border could happen here, suggested Dix, a sworn opponent of the company’s proposal to construct a 1,000-kilometre pipeline across northern B.C.
Underscoring the point, he started his news conference by reading a telling passage from that day’s findings by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board on Enbridge’s handling of a July 2010 spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River:
The fracture of the pipeline along a flaw identified five years earlier and duly ignored. The company’s 17-hour failure to respond to alarms, all the while pumping oil through the two-metre-wide rift and into the waterway.
The fact that it took workers from another company to make Enbridge aware of the spill and finally set in motion the necessary procedures to shut off the flow.
“Learning about Enbridge’s poor handling of the rupture,” read Dix, quoting safety board chair Debbie Hersman, “you can’t help but think of the Key-stone Kops.”
Keystone Kops is presumably a cute shot by the U.S. regulator at the proposed (and very controversial) Keystone pipeline, which would transport Canadian oil to American refineries.
But Dix had no difficulty turning the riff to his own purposes, as he waded into the B.C. Liberals and Premier Christy Clark over what he perceives as their dereliction of duty on the proposed Northern Gateway project.
Clark’s failure to say where she stands on an oil pipeline that, in her own characterization, offers B.C. much risk and limited benefits. Plus her government’s failure to submit any evidence of those presumed risks before the filing deadline for the current National Energy Board hearings on the project.
The B.C. Liberals and their leader have gone “absent with-out leave” on the Enbridge file, declared Dix, in the most quotable line from the midday press conference at the Opposition offices in downtown Vancouver.
As he spoke, reporters were still digesting the findings of the latest poll of public opinion, an Angus Reid survey that provided cause for good cheer among New Democrats and nothing to hearten Clark and the Liberals.
Yes, the numbers can change. But it is increasingly hard to imagine a scenario that will reverse Clark’s personal disapproval rating (64 per cent), her dismal standing with women voters (they prefer Dix by a margin of three to one), and the responses from more than half of those surveyed that their opinion of her has “worsened” in the past three months.
