Mike Smyth of the Vancouver Province took on Adrian Dix this morning for not applying the same principles in his stance on the proposed Enbridge pipeline and consequent tanker traffic to the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline twinning.
Mike is absolutely right. Dix has shown a political wimpishness which puts him, on this issue at any rate, right there alongside Premier Christy Clark.
The proposed lines both go through wild, inaccessible areas of BC, will carry the same gunk (bitumen), with the same certainty of disaster. Bitumen is impossible to clean up at the best of times (see Kalamazoo/Enbridge) and spills will be out of reach of any spill cleanup attempted. As I say, that doesn’t much matter because they can’t be cleaned up anyway.
We will have, along side the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline, the same pattern of serial spills, growing with each spill, with the same deadly results.
Dix’s cowardice comes out of the recent Chilliwack by-election when he felt it unwise to be against Kinder Morgan because it would look like the NDP was against everything. He came up with the weasel explanation that he hadn’t yet seen the Kinder Morgan environmental plan.
Why are those “weasel” words?
Because Dix knows as much about Kinder Morgan as he does about Enbridge. The argument has been proved. Both pipelines go through a hugely sensitive environment with fish bearing rivers and streams and Kinder Morgan’s threatens the Fraser River directly. The bitumen is the same, the spills a certainty and impossible to clean up.
The tanker traffic is deadly for both.
Get your act together, Mr. Dix or, on this issue at any rate, you aren’t much of an improvement over Premier Clark.
The Angus Reid poll on Enbridge published today shows a majority of British Columbians against the project. It must have been commissioned by Enbridge – at least that’s the suspicion when the story in both morning papers emphasizes that 24% might change their minds if Premier Clark gets her demands met. That sounds to me like “if the dog hadn’t stopped to pee he’d have caught the cat.”
This issue is not going to get any better for the pipeline people as the inevitability of catastrophic ongoing spills and the accumulation of ecological disasters becomes more firmly understood by the public. This will get clearer and clearer as time passes.
As I’ve said before in these pages, Premier Clark’s demand for better environmental oversight and money from Alberta are going nowhere. No matter what environmental safeguards are put in place there will be spills on land and sea on a serial basis. And there is no such thing as a “minor” spill of bitumen.
Enbridge’s Kalamazoo disaster turned out to be the biggest land spill in US history.
Finally, in my view as on octogenarian native of British Columbia, I say that our wilderness and coastlines are not for sale and I think that’s a view supported by most of us.
Kinder Morgan is just as dangerous a project as the Embridge pipeline. It maybe that Kinder Morgan doesn’t have as much press aimed at it. it maybe slipping under the radar of many so Dix doesn’t have to deal with it. From a political position I am sure he doesn’t want to be accused of being against everything or business, etc.
He might want to turn the Kinder Morgan file over to another mla who can give it their full attention. Anything which increases the tanker traffic on the west coast is not on & that includes the pipeline doubling.
we have survived this long with out them, we’ll survive a lot longer with out them now. We should not be shipping all of this bitamen out of country. We would be much better off to refine it on site & them use if for Canadian purposes only. Selling some to the Americans won’t hurt. It gives us some cash & it keeps China out of Canada. Because once they are in, they are going to turn this into one of their colonies. I have no problem with Chinese workers immigrating to Canada. What I don’t want is temporary workers on visas who can be threatened into doing what the company wants ¬ having a commitment to Canada.
We should be making our own stuff again, locally. None of this crap of our raw stuff going out (with our jobs) at considerable expense with OUR fuel to some foreign sweatshop to be made (with OUR fuel) into stuff we used to make ourselves (with our fuel) , only better, and now, not only is it made somewhere else (our lost jobs), it gets shipped back to us (with OUR fuel) for us to buy here at inflated prcies by foreign-owned retailers! HELLO? What the hell are economists smopking?
What?????we don’t want to export raw logs!!!!!!!! They are going out by the shipload every day, ,,in containers out of vancouver hbr.and out of Port Alberni and Nanaimo, not to mention other secret locations like Nootka Sound and others
Mr Dix has also shown a similar lack of sand in relation to the smart meter roll out. These meters are the means the Liberals are using to pay for private power and the privatizing of our rivers.
Does he also attend the Bilderburger meetings?
The reason your practical suggestion is a non-starter at the moment is that the 1% don’t want it that way.
I have not heard any reasons why Canada should not build a refinery on the tar sands site and refine the crude into gasoline and other by-products.
Can anyone give me a reason why this should not be done. My understanding is it would cost about ten billion to build a refinery capable of handling the same volume as would be piped down the two corridors.
We don’t want to export raw logs, why would we want to export crude when we can refine it ourselves. Canada should have its own supply of gasoline that is not subject to “commodity pricing” where Canadians just line the pocket of wall street investors.