Liberal leader Justin Trudeau made a campaign stop on the North Shore Thursday to announce his party’s plans to beef up marine protected areas and restore funding to marine scientific research.
Flanked by local Liberal candidates, and accompanied by a phalanx of national campaign staff and media, Trudeau stopped at the dock of West Vancouver’s John Lawson Park pledging to increase the amount of Canada’s marine and coastal protected areas by 10 per cent by 2020.
Trudeau also promised to reinstate $40 million he said has been cut from the federal government’s ocean science and monitoring program. “The war on science ends,” he said.
The Liberal leader also said he supports a moratorium on oil-tanker traffic along B.C.’s northern coast, repeating his position opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline project.
The Great Bear Rainforest is “not a place for a crude oil pipeline,” he said.
But Trudeau ducked questions of whether he supports other projects that have been environmentally controversial, like the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion project and the Woodfibre LNG project proposed for nearby Howe Sound.
On those, Trudeau would only say that he supports ensuring full environmental assessments are conducted.
“Citizens need to be assured issues are properly addressed,” he said. “Before projects get built, they have to acquire social licence.”
He added one factor that should be considered is that fewer oil pipelines means an increase in oil shipments by rail.
Both the Woodfibre proposal in Howe Sound and the Kinder Morgan proposal, which would see an increase in oil tanker traffic in Burrard Inlet, have been hot topics in North and West Vancouver.
The same day, Lynne Quarmby, the Green Party candidate for Burnaby-North Seymour, voiced disappointment after the Supreme Court of Canada turned down a request by her and other environmental groups to act as intervenors before the National Energy Board hearings on the Kinder Morgan project.
“As a scientist, I am very concerned about climate change,” said Quarmby in a press statement. Quarmby added the NEB review of the project has become “thoroughly discredited.”
“The whole review process has become an approval process,” she stated.
Trudeau took a few shots at both Conservatives and the NDP during his West Vancouver stop, criticizing the Conservatives’ environmental record in general and painting those in the party as having “openly questioned the existence of climate change.”
Trudeau said NDP leader Thomas Mulcair “can’t do what it takes to protect the environment” because of his promise to not run a deficit.
In May, federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea also stopped in West Vancouver for a pre-election announcement that Ottawa would spend up to $2.2 million on upgrades to its West Vancouver fisheries research facility. At that announcement attended by MP John Weston, Shea also pledged money to strengthen Ottawa’s $37 million five-year Marine Protected Areas program and a previously-announced $2 million for the Pacific Salmon Foundation towards studying factors affecting survival of juvenile salmon in the Strait of Georgia and surrounding marine environments.
