Here are three things to remember about Premier Clark and the Enbridge pipeline:
1. She did not reject the pipeline – she simply said that Enbridge had not met BC’s conditions.
2. She has, simply said “we want money”, which reminds me of the old chestnut where a man invites a lady to bed offering her $25,000 dollars. With much hemming and hawing she accepts. He then offers her $25 dollars instead and she shrieks, “Do you think I’m a common whore”. He replies “we’ve already established that madam…now we’re dickering about the price”. That’s what the premier has done.
3. She hasn’t asked the main question – nor has anyone else including the media. That is, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary you can clean up a leak, assuming you can, how do you expect to get crews and heavy machinery into the Rocky Mountains, Rocky Mountain Trench, Coast Range or Great Bear Rainforest?
For all the crap we’re going to hear in the next year or so, these questions will not be dealt with, simply because they can’t be.
The Enbridge spill into the Kalamazoo River nearly 3 years ago demonstrates that even when access is easy, these spills are essentially forever, yet we will be smothered by company claims of “world class cleanup” processes, new-style pipelines and so on. This is the oldest gimmick of all – if you cannot answer the question, change the question to one you can.
We who raise these issues will be said to be against all development, etc., and even the NDP will start its slow but steady reversal of attitude.
Let me predict another couple of things for you.
Site “C” will go ahead, the price will move to $10 billion and the energy will be sold at much reduced rates to gas “frackers” so they can use publicly supplied energy to extract and send shale gas to Prince Rupert and Kitimat to be converted (more energy used again) to Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and shipped to foreign markets (using yet more energy) to enrich large corporations at our expense.
There will be no great energy bonanza to the government from this and Santa Claus must be your faithful pen pal to believe that there will be a “Prosperity Fund” with over $100 Billion in it to make us debt-free and actually rolling in dough.
The biggest problem facing Premier Clark is how to get rid of BC Hydro to the private sector, mostly because of the disastrous private river power policy of the Campbell/Clark government. This issue, to their eternal shame, wasn’t even mentioned by the NDP in the last election. In fact, even those who wouldn’t vote NDP under any circumstances should be appalled at the Official Opposition’s dereliction in its duty to oppose this program, because most of them want BC Hydro saved – if it can be.
We’re in for four years of a government in a deep hole because of their terrible misgovernment, faced by an opposition that disgraced themselves and simply won’t be taken seriously no matter whom they select as leader.
The only thing we can hope for is an incensed public which is prepared to turn to massive civil disobedience.
