The Liberal party has a web page that invites all Canadians to support Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “bold plan to fight climate change.”
The web page extols credible environmental policies and bashes the previous Conservative government.
It’s true Stephen Harper would have made his announcement with more discretion and less charm; but he would have made the same announcement.
Trudeau approved Kinder Morgan’s project while rejecting Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline.
His rationale for dismissing Enbridge was that it wasn’t in the best interests of the affected communities.
We would argue that it’s very rarely in the interests of a community to be affected by a pipeline.
There will be jobs, but they’ll come at the cost of the land surrounding the pipeline, which will be permanently lost to our economy.
There are numerous environmental and health concerns surrounding unreported pipe ruptures, tankers running aground, and the ability of spilled bitumen to elude a response crew’s booms.
But even if every last drop stays in the pipeline and in the tankers, we still face a colossal problem: our forward-thinking leader is stuck in the past.
The 119,000 kilometres of pipeline that have criss-crossed the country over the past 160 years have spurred our economy, but they’ve also led us to the precipice of environmental catastrophe. The path to a carbon-free future is not paved with oil. Anyone who says different is selling something.
At press time, 1,333 Canadians had pledged to support Trudeau’s bold plan to fight climate change. We hope our prime minster will someday be among them.
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