An open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:
Our delight in your victory, last autumn’s sunny ways, and Canada’s stellar performance at COP21 (climate change conference in Paris last December) are fading memories.
The letdown began about Spring Break with cabinet’s nonchalant approval of Woodfibre LNG in the face of strong opposition including outright rejection by every local government in the region. We felt blindsided.
June brought the deeply contentious Kinder Morgan approval.
Your Trans Mountain Expansion Panel, hastily assembled for damage control and mandated simply to listen, suffered blatant conflict of interest, was toothless, and appeared to serve no useful purpose.
We saw the summertime flurry of MP-organized Democracy Talks across B.C. as rigged to distract attention from pipeline/tanker/environmental concerns and to soften us up for cabinet approval of one or more projects in December.
The word is out that you favour Kinder Morgan.
Would that be a science-based decision?
As a British Columbian and retired mariner who lived through the 1964 bunker fuel spill in Howe Sound, I cannot overstate my concern regarding the risk of massively expanded tanker transport of diluted bitumen through Burrard Inlet.
You know that the probability of a dilbit spill of eight million or more litres over a 50-year operating cycle is 10 per cent (Trans Mountain calculation).
You know, too, that a big dilbit spill in Burrard Inlet or the Salish Sea could be catastrophic since dilbit sinks under real world conditions (U.S. National Academy of Sciences finding), therefore assurances of effective spill recovery and cleanup are near meaningless.
Pushing ahead now with major fossil fuel infrastructure is incompatible with meeting our climate change commitment. We cannot do both.
What happened to your promise to overhaul the pipeline approval process?
Why have you flip-flopped about community social licence?
When will you step up to the climate leadership role we saw in you?
Your father’s middle finger salute to B.C. will be remembered as a friendly gesture compared to your own hypocrisy if you, our climate-savvy prime minister, grandson of the North Shore – you who have said our future is the future of our young people – break faith with so many who have worked so hard and with such good reason to see you elected.
I beg you not to approve the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion.
Roger Sweeny
West Vancouver
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