You should read Environment Minister Terry Lake’s op-ed piece in Friday’s Vancouver Sun. If ever you needed proof of the utter incompetence of the Campbell/Clark government this will do it.
He gives the government position re the proposed Enbridge pipeline.
Lake calls for the Joint Review Panel to “successfully complete the environment review process”.
What does that mean, Mr. Lake, when the federal government says that Enbridge will go anyway? Don’t you see that the fix is in!
Have you ever been to such a meeting, minister?
You will find an essential piece missing – namely, can the people of BC give their opinions as to whether or not they want the project in the first place?
Then you call for “World leading marine oil spill reaction, prevention and oil recovery systems for BC’s coastline and ocean to manage and mitigate the risks and cost of heavy oil pipelines and shipments”.
Who writes this crap? The ever-active PR department of Enbridge?
Don’t you understand that spills are inevitable and likely in areas too remote for any machinery to get in? And that there’s very little they can do about it anyway, as demonstrated by Enbridge’s 2010 spill into the Kalamazoo River?
Haven’t you looked at Enbridge’s spill record of more than one per week?
But there is a deeper question minister – don’t you understand that the consequences of spillage of bitumen, whether on land or in the ocean, are many, many times more lethal than the crude oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez?
Don’t you understand that unlike crude oil spills, the bitumen sinks like a rock? With crude oil, the technique of “rafting” corrals the spill and allows much of it to be siphoned off, but that you can’t do that with bitumen?
Don’t you get it? That we’re not talking about risks, but, by Enbridge’s own admission, certainties? Certainties with catastrophic consequences?
I hate to urge people to read the Vancouver Sun, but your article is such appalling drivel that it gives the public a unique opportunity to see the sloppy crap that is your government’s mindless and highly political response to certain destruction of our heritage – all to supply China with bitumen to refine.
At least you have, by this column, made clear what environmentalists have been saying all along – the Clark government is unfit to govern.
