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The BC Liberals have just offered the sword of surrender to Enbridge and Ottawa as the organ-grinder’s monkey, Environment Minister Terry Lake, made clear in a statement today.

Separating the pepper from the fly shit, the Liberals want more money and more environmental safeguards imposed upon Enbridge, which must be severely monitored by the feds. (With the same enthusiasm the Department of Fisheries and Oceans safeguards our Pacific Salmon, no doubt.)

As I said here recently, Premier Clark has declared that BC is a whore, the only thing to be decided being how much?

Let me place matters on the table once more:

1.    There will be ruptures in this 1,100 km. pipeline by the admission of Enbridge and now conceded as the only possible inference to be drawn from Lake’s statement demanding better clean-up arrangements.

2.    This pipeline goes over two mountain ranges and through a dense wilderness and is inaccessible to any cleanup undertaking. To make this plain to this corrupt bunch, you cannot get to the spills.

3.    Such is the nature of the bitumen to be piped you can’t clean it up even if you could get to it.

4.    The pipeline becomes a permanent serial polluter with one environmental catastrophe following another.

Of course Premier Clark will have her “demands” met.

More money is a slam dunk because there’s a hell of a lot of it available. It will start with offers to build the port facilities at Kitimat – which is sort of like offering to donate your the grave and headstone if you’ll commit suicide. There will be royalty sharing offered along with lots of cash to buy off First Nations.

Of course the feds and Enbridge will meet the demands in the press release which were:

The province wants limits to liability in the event of an oil spill to ensure there are sufficient financial resources to properly address the effects of a spill and it is calling for increased federal government response.

B.C. also wants tougher federal rules requiring industry to provide and replace marine response equipment.

And the province wants a Natural Resources Damage Assessment process to give certainty that a responsible party will address all costs associated with a spill.

The naiveté is breathtaking! Why, I imagine Prime Minister Harper will even say “cross my heart and hope to die” when he makes the solemn pledges!

This is an act of craven cowardice to help the bedraggled, leader challenged BC Liberals for the May 2013 election.

Harper will come up with oodles of safeguards just as the BC government did with fish farms and will pursue them with the same diligence his government and the BC government has with the Fish Farmers.

I don’t mean to be rude, folks, but how do you compensate for lost or badly polluted fish habitat, starving caribou and polluted rivers? How do you put a dollar figure on shattered ecologies? How do you compensate First Nations for lost hunting grounds? How do you compensate the tourist industry for their lost revenues?

Perhaps most importantly, what is the going rate for a province that has just sold its soul?

Premier Clark and her bedraggled, divided gutless cabinet and caucus have sold us out in hopes they can rally the right wing back into the fold and you can bet the ranch that Harper will go easy on the BC government when the HST expires next April as part of this surrender package.

Our provincial government, in place to protect our province’s integrity has, as predicted, sold us out for a mess of pottage in a sorry attempt to save its grubby political hide.

4 Responses to “BC Liberal Government Surrenders to Enbridge, Ottawa”

  1. e.a.f. says:

    nice column. I would suggest c.c. is just looking for money, lots of it. They have an election breathing down their necks & it would be oh so much better if they had some money left in the bank. She & her fellow travellers will also need jobs once they are out of politics. I’m sure they are applying.

    Embridge will promise them anything & everything. All they have to do is declare bankruptcy to get out of paying for “clean up”. We know Harper isn’t doing to do anything in terms of preparedness. he just cut funding for the coast guard & the urban rescue teams. If he doesn’t care about human lives I am sure he isn’t going to be concerned about wild life, rivers, etc. He isn’t going to be concerned about F.N. people. He is already letting them die a slow death on reserves & has cut funding for mental health care.

    What none of them wants to understand is B.C. is “rough country” or didn’t they see the second slide at Johnson Landing, live on t.v.. No pipeline in that area could have withstood it. There would have been bitamen & chemicals all over the place. Then they would have had to wait until some body noticed, got there, established people could go onto the mess to fix it. By that time we might be 2 weeks up the road.

    This oil/bitamen isn’t for Canada, its for foreign countries & multinational corporations. They get all the money, we get all the risk, disease, etc. Canada has done quite well without these pipelines so we will do just as well in the future. It is only greed on the part of corporations & they have some how convinced many Canadian politicians they should just let the corporations do what they want.

    Just remember all those corporations don’t even pay any taxes of note. We have only to read how much money corporations have stashed in tax havens.

    My country isn’t for sale at any price.

  2. Stannis says:

    Is it just me or is selling oil to a Communist dictatorship any different than it would have been in 1936 selling resources to Fascist Germany. Those that don’t learn from history are doomed…
    e.a.f. I fully agree with your comment re: the Johnson slide. Well actually everything.

  3. David McLean says:

    What we have here is a Lame Duck politician from BC whom by the way has run to the Harper Government for political guidance to desperately remain in power. And what we have in Ottawa is a Harper Government that is still licking it’s wounds from the Progressive Conservative rout of their Wild Rose party.

    Harper is using Clark to destabilize the PC’s successful Canadian wide agreement to talk about Canadian Energy Development. Redford has the National stage something the Harper Government does not want to happen, remember that Harper has been sitting on his hands energy wise for six long years leading to Canada receiving a black eye on the international stage.

    Redford’s lead on Canada’s energy portfolio has received accolades right across the board as it has opened up a much needed discussion on responsible energy production from Oil to Green energy options.

    Clark from the BC Liberals has shown the ability to do the dirty deeds BC Rail in the past decade to now enriching supporters again by giving in to the lucrative proposal to privatize the liquor distribution branch. Again this would take effect 10 weeks prior to the next BC election robbing the people of BC once again of their voice to approve or oppose such a mayor change in much needed Government revenue.

    Clark will be reward by Harper if she can stop any talk of responsible Canadian Energy development. The last disgraced BC Liberal leader was rewarded by the Harper Government as Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on September 15, 2011. Another slap in the face to the people of BC left behind to pick up the pieces.

    Campbell’s final poll number 9%, Clark’s last poll number 30% strongly trending down.

    As one commenter stated: I wonder if she’d try to downplay being voted out, and think she’s still the premier.

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