This is not a threat – just a warning to both senior governments. Something is happening in this province that I’ve warned about for a couple of years – let me explain.
For years governments have brought in environmental policy, especially as it relates to fish, rivers, wildlife areas and the like which divides the environmental community.
In the fishing area, the federal government, in particular, has encouraged all manner of interest groups – some based upon geography, some on species of fish, some professional fishermen, some sports, and on it goes. Divide and rule.
With wildlife issues, it’s been much of the same approach.
Starting about five years ago something happened that I and others in the environmental field noticed and reported on – a great number of what I will call well-off people from West Vancouver who had fought to save Eagleridge Bluffs from the rape the tractors of the uncaring and stubborn Transportation minister, Kevin Falcon; who went en masse to Delta to help local people fight the desecration on their area, also by the same Transportation Minister who, incidentally, has complained that we’re not like China, which couldn’t care less about the environment and brooks no dissent.
The “better-off” communities getting seriously involved in environmental issues was demonstrated by the good citizens of Tsawwassen fighting the overhead power lines, a battle that again brought people from other communities into the ring. These were not the first times environmental groups have helped one another but it showed that environmental concerns had crossed, for want of a better word, “class” lines.
Then, Delta did the unbelievable – it voted in an independent MLA who defeated the Attorney-General of the province – didn’t you notice that, Premier?
The good folks in the Kootenays have risen as one against the Glacier-Howser private river power project and have made it plain that it just is not going to happen!
All around BC, people are rising against their political masters and saying, “No damned way.”
The BC government has seemed anxious to piss off as many citizens as they can, as their policies destroyed our salmon and traumatized our rivers. They clearly didn’t give a fiddler’s fart for our wilderness or farmland – our precious “Supernatural BC”, as Grace McCarthy aptly named it.
In my travels around the province doing speeches, I noticed people there I would not have expected. The mail I get is short on the old chants of days of yore and long on impatience with both senior governments – and they’re deadly serious about stopping them.
Now we have both senior governments in favour of pipelines across our wilderness, carrying Tar Sands sludge, called “bitumen” in polite society, and putting this highly toxic petrochemical into huge tankers to move it down the world’s most dangerous (and perhaps most beautiful) coastline.
Very early we’ve seen how the feds will fight – as dirty as the shit in their much loved pipelines. They have set up a federal panel review but, get this, you only have until next week to file your intention to attend but they’re not going to tell you when and where the hearings will be held until sometime in 2012! This is the sort of merry little trick the Private Power bastards work – hold the obligatory, fixed, in-advance hearing at as inconvenient a time as you can, in a place too small for the expected crowd and as far as possible from where most people live.
Now let’s issue the fair warning to both governments. Premier Photo-op and Prime Minister Harper – he who so nicely rewarded the worst polluter in BC history with the softest and most pleasant diplomatic post in the world – listen carefully!
The public of BC is no longer disputing amongst themselves. All of us now support one another, speak at each other’s gatherings and in every way possible, help each other fight our battles, shoulder to shoulder. We will no longer be divided and, to put it plainly – there’s going to be hell to pay.
Yes, there will be civil disobedience and lots of it if these pipelines are approved or there is one more river dammed. For example, with the Enbridge Pipeline, if the governments are sufficiently unfeeling and arrogant to proceed, there will be agro virtually every meter of the way.
It’s clear that BC First Nations, many of them hard-up, will be a huge part of the battle.
I might just add for Premier Clark: You’re toast unless you have a Damascus-like conversion – and I say that without a care about when you hold the next election. I also warn you that the polls you will get do not ask the right questions – I know because I’ve been questioned. You and your economic pals at the Fraser Institute are passé – you’ve disgraced yourselves from that deadly day in 2001 when you were elected, and unless there is a miraculous change, you will get your comeuppance on the next chance we have to send you back into radio, where you won’t have a government’s ass to kiss as before.
No one I know in the environmental movement wants trouble but that can’t and won’t stop us if you don’t stop ravaging our province. People now understand that pipelines and oil tankers are not risks at all but dead certainties.
You see, Premier, no one believes a single word you or the corporations say.
