I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but we’re on the brink of a civil war, and the battleground is in our own front yard.
It’s hard not to sound alarmist when you’re talking about the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline. Approved by Ottawa, it will turn the company’s facility along the Burnaby shoreline into a major tank storage and shipping facility.
In case you’ve been sleeping in a cave along Mosquito Creek, that means increasing the amount of oil sands diluted bitumen (a.k.a. toxic sludge) in the pipeline from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day. That means the number of tankers into Burrard Inlet will increase from five to 34 a month. And it means the number of holding tanks along the shore will more than double from 12 to 26.
What all this does is increase the risk of a bitumen spill that will, according to some estimates, cost $40 billion to clean up, and not before it kills 100,000 seabirds and threatens to wipe out marine mammals such as orcas, porpoises and harbour seals.
All this, according to Green Party leader Andrew Weaver, for 90 permanent jobs.
The tankers, longer than the Shangri-La hotel is high, will squeeze gingerly back and forth under both the First and Second Narrows bridges. The storage tanks are directly across the inlet from North Vancouver. And while Burnaby is ground zero, a spill or a tank fire would also have a mind-boggling impact on the North Shore.
Got it? OK, now the civil war part. The recent provincial election has made it possible for the NDP and Weaver’s Greens to form the next government, and they, unlike Christy Clark’s Liberals, are firmly opposed to the pipeline expansion, joining all the local mayors and First Nations.
So what looked like a done deal is anything but. As Brent Richter reported in these pages June 1, there are a number of legal and regulatory avenues a determined opponent could apply to at least stall the pipeline.
And that has Alberta politicians spitting undiluted bitumen at B.C. “Mark my words, that pipeline will be built, the decisions have been made,” says Premier Rachel Notley, growling peevishly that B.C. doesn’t own the coast. Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, formerly a national poster boy for progressive clauses, sounds like an oil baron on this one, calling concerns about the pipeline “fear-mongering.”
So you’ve got the Alberta NDP and federal governments lined up alongside Kinder Morgan, and the B.C. NDP/Green thing, local mayors and First Nations lined up against Kinder Morgan, and the B.C. Liberals, nominally still in charge of the province, apparently just sidelined.
Caught in the middle are the citizens and seabirds of Burnaby and North Vancouver. And if the spill, should it occur, promises to be as damaging as critics say it will, so are the rest of the citizens of the South Coast. Approximately 2.5 million people. More than half the population of Alberta.
It doesn’t seem to matter that NDP government will be pitted against NDP government. It’s a family feud, a fight to the finish.
It’s all about how much you stand to gain … and how much you stand to lose.
I’m a little surprised at Notley and Nenshi, who appear satisfied because the National Energy Board has done its due diligence and has issued its approval. Nenshi, who can be a little insufferable, took a shot at vociferous pipeline opponent Vancouver Mayor Robertson, in response to Robertson’s open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau: “I’m not sure Mayor Robertson has actually read the NEB report, because I have,” he said.
There’s more: “What’s happened here I think is that Mayor Robertson, frustrated that his arguments – which were not very strong to begin with – did not hold water at the NEB, is trying a Hail Mary pass and this shotgun approach that it’s about the economy, or climate change, or safety, but these are all things in fact that the NEB did consider.”
OK, his metaphors are mixed, but his message is clear. Only a weak-minded Wet Coast dilettante would oppose such a noble endeavour. Easy for him to say … in Calgary, which is about 1,000 kilometres away from ground zero.
Meanwhile, Kinder Morgan keeps telling everybody the existing pipeline has gone 60 years without a major spill, which only serves to remind us that the damned thing needs to be replaced anyway.
I’m not much for forecasting, mainly because I’m usually wrong. But if I were a betting columnist, I’d wager against the pipeline expansion. Whatever; the civil war promises to be invigorating. Not in My Front Yard! NIMFY?
Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Vancouver resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. p.sullivan@breakthroughpr.com
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