Vancouver Province
for April 12, 2001

Very soon British Columbians will have to make a statement on where they stand on matters environmental. And the temptations to stand on the right rather than the left will be substantial.

Prime Minister Chretien, late last week, pronouncing himself as a lover of Western Canada after all, encouraged Albertans to send as much oil and gas to the US as possible. At the same time he dissolved a Commons committee looking into the export of bulk water to the States presumably because they would throw, ahem, cold water on the idea.

Into this mix, dump the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gases, which the United States, purely for economic reasons, has abandoned.

We don’t know for sure that there is oil and natural gas off the B.C. coast. What we do know is that experts on such matters believe there are and since oil and gas reserves upon which the United States relies are in politically restless places, pressure will rise to do extensive drilling. Once we undertake serious drilling we can be sure that any success will be followed by all-out exploitation and all that entails.

What we do know for sure is that we have water. All kinds of it. And there, in the short term, the temptation to sell it in bulk will be even greater than for oil and gas. For now the United States has sufficient supplies of the latter but is desperately short of water.

We must recognize, as we start our deliberations, that while British Columbia doesn’t have the power to regulate exports, it clearly has the power to prevent them being extracted in the first place. Moreover, there can be no debate on the money issue – if we have oil and gas, and decide to exploit and sell it to the American market, we’ll make bags of money - perhaps enough to offset the decline in our forestry industry. Same with water.

The debate, then is on environmental and moral issues – issues that usually succumb to a large infusion of cash into the debate.

Let’s deal with water – why not sell water that, after all, is simply going to waste as it spills into the Pacific? And why not, say, draw down the Thompson a few inches (as has been proposed) if we can make buckets of money? Well, on the latter score, a few inches of river when a drought occurs, can make the difference of spawning or perishing at Hell’s Gate for millions of salmon. Inches mean that much. As to the wasted water spilling into the ‘chuck, that’s not what happens. There is an ecosystem in river-mouths and an important one. One of the most serious consideration is the fact that estuaries are the nurseries to millions of salmon.

The considerations for the exploitation of petroleum resources raise even more complicated environmental concerns. We are told, of course, that offshore drilling has been proved safe. At the same time we learn that one of the world’s largest oil rigs just sank off the coast of Brazil leaking millions of gallons of oil. We’re told that oil tanker technology is now almost surely safe – except we know that when the "almost" fails us the results are devastating.

The problem is one of probabilities, be it oil spills or a shortage of water for migrating salmon. When industrialists and their bought and paid for politicians talk about "acceptable risks" they talk nonsense. If you are only going to run a risk for a short time, the risk may be worth taking but if you’re going to take the risk forever, it’s no longer a risk but a certainty - the only unknown factor is, when? It’s like playing Russian Roulette with a 1000 chamber revolver – the chances of it going off each time you pull the trigger are 1 in 1000. But if you pull it forever, sooner or later you blow your brains out.

But is there not a larger ethical concern here? Does Canada not stand for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Do we wish to help perpetuate the world’s dependence on petroleum? And can we, on the one hand stand squarely against present North American greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time help, at great profit to ourselves, the all-consumptive uncaring economic engine to the south of us spew CO2 into the atmosphere?

Tough questions to be sure – but questions we must answer.