[I keep asking politicians, when I'm in the same inside or outside space with them, "If the Trans Mountain Expansion is so amazingly good for us, why do you have to lie about it? About Asian markets, about price-per-barrel, about number of jobs, about tax revenues?" - Gene McGuckin]
Chief Lee Spahan from Coldwater Indian Band was happy to hear the news: the Federal Court of Appeal will hear his nation’s legal challenge against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.
[The federal government purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline and expansion project from Kinder Morgan in 2018, yet Ian Anderson continues to serve as Trans Mountain president and CEO and speak for the company.
What is the function of the federal government in all this? Is it restricted to being the bearer of financial risk?]
The words may not have been explicit, but oilpatch contractor Matthew Linnitt says he read between the lines: lie on official documents about an incident that could have killed him, or someone would be fired.
The tacit threat, he alleges, was handed down by his supervisor at Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) after a close call with hydrogen sulfide on a northwestern Alberta well site on May 2, 2016.
The Trudeau government and the petrobloc (the fossil fuel industries and their political, financial and media allies) would like you to believe that the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline (TMX), intended to triple the flow of diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Sands to the port of Vancouver, is a done deal.
But the latest approval of TMX by the Trudeau government and the industry-friendly National Energy Board does not settle the issue.
With the exception of Donald Trump’s claim that he’s draining the swamp, it’s hard to imagine a clearer example of gibberish than Jason Kenney’s claim that he’s defending Alberta against “foreign-funded special interests.”
Financing costs total $87 million in first seven months of government ownership
The Trans Mountain pipeline posted a $36 million net loss for the federal government in the first seven months that it owned the pipeline, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
A big chunk of that loss is attributable to $87 million in financing – i.e. interest on the debt the government incurred to buy the pipeline from Kinder Morgan Canada (TSX:KML).
As we know, big lies can run free across borders with few people joining the dots. For example, no media has been reporting that China’s growing dispute with Canada is based on Canada’s enforcement of the Trump administration’s unilateral embargo against Iran. This is what politicians called ‘the rule of law’. In fact, it is assisting the US takedown of China’s superior IT competition – Huawei – for not obeying the illegal US embargo.
