With the hearings into the $5.5-billion Enbridge pipeline proposal starting today, Canada's natural resources minister declared Monday that "environmental and other radical groups" are trying to undermine Canada's economy.
Joe Oliver also moaned about "jet-setting celebrities" and "foreign special-interest groups" taking over the "broken" approval process for a pipeline that would carry crude 1,200 kilometres from Alberta to Kitimat, where the oil would be loaded onto tankers and shipped to Asia.
This comes hot on the heels of Prime Minister Stephen Harper fussing about foreign interests clogging the regulatory process.
Which raises a couple of points:
- Oliver, channelling his inner Spiro Agnew, has done nothing to dispel the notion that the hearings are a rubber stamp by a Conservative government that thinks the environment is some hippie crap that the Liberals left in the basement.
- The Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative was quick to ask why the foreign meddling of the likes of Korea's Daewoo, Japan Canada Oil Sands, Britain's BP and China's Sinopec doesn't fluster the prime minister in the same way the enviros do.
- When Marven Robinson looks in the mirror, he doesn't see a well-heeled foreign celebrity.
Robinson is one of the Heroes of Hartley Bay, the guys who hopped in their boats and raced to the rescue when the Queen of the North sank on a rainswept, chilly night in March 2006.
He's also on the band council of the Gitga'at First Nation, whose members include the 200 who live at tiny, isolated Hartley Bay, and who are freaked out by the idea of 225 oil tankers negotiating the narrow waters at their doorstep each year.
"It's all risk to us," he said Monday while preparing to go to the aboriginal community of Kitimat for the first day of the 18 months of hearings. "There's no benefit."
The more the Gitga'at ask questions of Enbridge, the more certain they are that it's just a question of when, not if, a spill will occur in waters from which tankers have effectively been banned for decades. Robinson says federal bureaucrats quietly tell him the pipeline is bad news. "Our 'no' is getting stronger."
As anachronistic as it might sound to urban Canada, the trade in natural foods remains at the heart of the coastal native economy. Oolichan grease comes down from Kitimat, herring roe from Klemtu. Dried seaweed and halibut go back and forth between Hartley Bay and Bella Bella.
"That's how we gauge our wealth," Robinson says. "I don't think there are many people in our community who have fewer than three deep freezes in their home."
The Gitga'at used to trade a lot of cockles and clams, but scaled back after the Queen of the North spill fouled the shellfish beaches. Note that the ferry held about 220,000 litres of diesel - roughly one-400th the capacity of an oil tanker.
Still, few like the odds of a few hundred isolated Indians and their seaweed stopping a multi-billion-dollar oil project (not, at least, until the natives contribute as much to Conservative coffers as does Big Oil), particularly with pipeline proponents arguing that the risk of a spill is statistically tiny.
But opponents can counter that it just takes one mistake to lead to disaster - and Victorians need not look far for proof that people make mistakes:
- A U.S. nuclear submarine captain was fired for almost colliding with an Alaskan freighter right out our front window in Juan de Fuca Strait in October.
- In 1988, a barge spilled 875,000 litres of bunker fuel off Grays Harbor, Wash. The spill was 250 kilometres from Vancouver Island and was just one-fiftieth the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, yet still fouled beaches from Sooke to Nootka Sound for months, killing thousands of birds.
- In 1991, when the Japanese fishing vessel Tenyo Maru sank near the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait after colliding with a Chinese freighter, oil spread as far south as Oregon.
- In 2010, a South Korean captain was jailed for drunk-driving a freighter just west of Port Angeles, within binocular distance of Victoria.
Given all that, you would think Oliver and Harper might have more patience before badmouthing those who choose to partake in the regulatory process.
"That's the crazy thing," Robinson says. "They ask us for our opinion, and then they say that kind of stuff."
Those "radicals" getting in the way of progress? It's called democracy and they're called Canadians.
jknox@timescolonist.com
