The Kinder Morgan Pipeline
Kitchen politics, an age old Canadian custom, is commonly practiced at my table. I join right in but also tend to get frustrated. What is the point of all this griping and brain storming if no one ever says a word to the people who are supposed to represent us? How can they possibly know what we think, what ideas we may have, what solutions we propose?
The internet is a public forum and I am not anonymous. I comment on and forward (try to fact check) FaceBook posts, tweet occasionally, e-mail government ministers, sign on-line petitions, and blog. Some of my paranoid friends think I’m crazy to put my opinions out there like that. Hopefully our democracy is strong enough to allow freedom of expression without repercussions. If the net becomes hamstrung by censorship it will lose much of its value.
Propaganda from home (news) and abroad streams continuously along the information super highway. Special interest groups, advertisers, foreign and domestic governments - all are supposedly applying algorithms to track our innermost secrets, our political leanings, our buying habits. Seems these days every time I click on a recipe or household tip I am forced to watch an ad encouraging me to elect Doug Ford! At the same time I see continuous memes decrying his far right agenda. When you get down to the nitty gritty you recognize that the truth is hard to find, maybe it’s somewhere in between.
Where, for example, is the truth behind the Kinder Morgan pipeline debate? We have 2 provinces pitted against one another; a federal government thinking of forcing compliance. We have sanctions; protests and civil disobedience; talk of provincial and/or federal monetary investment in a privately owned American business; pipeline supporters touting safety, jobs, and high environmental standards; pipeline protestors fearing land, aquifer, river and ocean pollution. Some say expanded markets are a joke - that the pipeline’s true purpose is to line the pockets of refineries in Washington state. Proponents laud expanded market possibilities. Law suits are looming. The debate drags on with no resolution in sight. It’s getting ugly.
So the round table politicians North of 54, most of whom have direct or indirect connections to the Alberta oil fields, dove into the Kinder Morgan pipeline debate just the other day. And we offer our thoughts on the subject.
Build the pipeline expansion according to strict environmental standards, no short cuts. Continue to impose high standards at the extraction point. Take the money, that which is being considered as a bail-out and that which is being lost (through court battles, time lost, damaged structure, sanctions), and apply it to a well trained, elite, active environmental protection force. Hire and train indigenous people to continuously monitor sections of the pipeline that pass through their traditional lands. Train and keep employed and at ready experts in both marine and land environmental clean-up. Fund environmental science to discover better and better ways to avoid and/or mitigate pipeline hazards. Earn people’s trust in the field of pipeline maintenance. We do, after all, have the expertise, equipment and manpower to be the best there is. Do not subsidize the profits of corporations who take our natural resources, at bargain prices, out of our country.
Oil is not going to go away. Not yet, maybe never. The people of British Columbia do care. We all care! But none of us are willing to lower our standard of living in order to establish a cleaner sustainable planet. In reality most of us are either too selfish or too lazy to make even simple changes in our behavior. So, ideally, we should encourage our governments to fund, seek out and promote renewable energy sources; put oil to use where no substitute is possible; maintain high environmental standards; and process more of our natural resources within Canada.
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