Burnaby, Squamish results among those where environmental concerns figured prominently

Basking in the satisfaction of a fifth term for himself and the third electoral sweep in a row for his civic party, Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan vowed Saturday to do everything in his power to block expansion of the Kinder Morgan oil pipeline through his municipality.

“We are going to utilize the system in order to make sure that this doesn’t proceed,” he declared in an interview after delivering a victory speech to supporters of his Burnaby Citizens Association. “This is only the beginning of what is a long war to protect our rights.”

Corrigan probably had a lock on another term at city hall without the fight that saw the city commit $200,000 from its share of gambling proceeds to a legal battle against Kinder Morgan’s proposed twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

But the company’s over-the-top lawsuits against individual protesters — angry facial expressions as a form of assault? How many billable hours did it take to concoct that one? — probably contributed a few points worth of public indignation to his almost 70-per-cent margin of victory.

Corrigan’s political success in fighting the pipeline is not without irony, given his longtime membership in the New Democratic Party and the role that the project played in its defeat in the last provincial election.

The NDP’s own postelection analysis held that “the decisive moment of the campaign” was when then leader Adrian Dix abandoned a carefully honed stance of neutrality and came out against Kinder Morgan...more