Premier Clark’s fight with Alberta Premier Redford over the Northern Gateway project is a very dangerous ploy. She has, by this action, said plainly that the BC environment is open to bids in exchange for the desecration of our province. We are the hooker bargaining over the price of services.
The Premier’s environmental stipulations will cause no concerns with Alberta, Ottawa or Enbridge. Of course they will agree to these terms including a clause re cost of damage – those promises are easy to make and easy to ignore. Once the bitumen starts to flow, how do you enforce any agreement?
The four salient facts remain – spills by Enbridge’s own admission are inevitable, the terrain is inaccessible, the bitumen is highly toxic and all but impossible to clean up, and once the pipeline is operative we will have serial spills, each time adding to existing spill damage.
The spat the premier has launched with Alberta Premier Redford is strictly political with the object of Clark and the Liberals getting better polling numbers.
Unfortunately for the premier, this is like sex – great while it lasts. What we’ve heard from Premier Redford is simply the first round of a long bidding exercise. It must be remembered that Premier Redford did, a few months ago, offer to help build the necessary docking facilities in Kitimat. (That strikes me as an offer to dig your grave and supply a headstone if you would be so kind as to commit suicide!)
What Premier Clark has done is buy a bit of political time in the hope that when next May’s election she will look as if she’s valiantly defending BC’s integrity.
The fact is she has BC in a process it should never be in – trading BC’s environment in exchange for unenforceable and useless environmental safeguards – and money, the amount and payer(s) to be determined. She is doing this not in our province’s interest but that of her party and herself.
This is vintage Liberal stuff – the first priority is always to get elected.
I don’t believe that this ploy will work. The opposition to the Northern Gateway (Enbridge) and tanker traffic is too great.
The responsible course – and one which would have helped her and her party considerably the long run, i.e. next May’s election, would have been to announce that the Liberal government was opposed to the entire Northern Gateway initiative and that in that respect the government and the opposition were agreed.
The general fainting spell this would bring would quickly pass and the NDP would have lost its initiative on this issue.
Alas, such responsible positions don’t happen in BC politics.
http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2012-07-25/enbridge-s-quiet-765-million-oil-spill.html
At least Redford won an election, and it was a tough one. Our charlatan
hasn’t got the guts to even speak to the people. Its just her and her Blackberry, filling in the void.
Yes, I do have to agree, just a whore discussing price and I do not mean that to be offensive to sex trade workers, who actually do work & provide a service.
I suspect chrispie also wants money prior to an election so she can look like there is some money in the bank & throw a few dollars around to “buy” votes. She has been long on promises but short on goods.
Anyone who saw the second Johnson Landing landslide on the news will understand a pipeline is not a good idea. There is no way a pipeline could have withstood the force of the slide. It was a day before they could even get on the slide to search because the area was so unstable.
I would suggest if the tankers would have just been up north it might have been an easier sell, but with tankers going through Vancouver, that is a lot of realestate to loose, not to mention the tourist industry.
The mountainous and otherwise inaccessible terrain in British Columbia make “quick response to oil pipeline leaks” in the best-case scenario very problematic. But, so far no one has talked about the clean up problems presented by a pipeline leak occuring during the wintertime when metres-deep of contaminated snowfall will need to be removed. And, how are we going access the spill in the first place-through deep snow and in severe winter conditions? Wait for the spring melt? I don’t know what amounts of snowfall can be expected along the pipeline route but any significant amount could adversely affect timely and adequate winter clean-up response in case of a leak.