British Columbia

Metro Vancouver is bracing for protests in regional parks such as Colony Farm and Surrey Bend after negotiating a deal with Kinder Morgan granting its crews access to plan the route of the proposed Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion.

Regional district staff outline the agreements in a briefing note that will be before Metro mayors at a meeting Friday.

Once again, local MP James Moore and his constituency office in Port Moody were targets of a petition, this time over last week’s oil spill near Vancouver.

On Friday, a group that included First Nations leaders and representatives from organizations like Leadnow and Council of Canadians, delivered a petition to Moore’s office on St. Johns Street calling on the federal government to reopen the Kitsilano Coast Guard Station, reverse cuts to marine communications centres in B.C., and ban increased tanker traffic on the coast.

Many Vancouverites are quite rightly enraged by the sight of oil-soaked birds struggling to survive around English Bay.

First Nations worry about the impact of the M/V Marathassafuel spill on the fishery.

For environmentalists, the recent accident confirmed their worst fears about the dangers associated with the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline project. If approved, it will triple shipments of diluted bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to the Lower Mainland and bring a massive increase in tanker traffic to Burrard Inlet.

Several hundred people marched through Fort Langley Saturday to oppose the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline that runs through Langley.

Organized by groups including the Pipe Up Network and the Kwantlen First Nation, the march headed from the Kwantlen reserve to the Fort Langley Community Hall.

The march paused in the center of the Jacob Haldi Bridge that connects MacMillan Island to the village of Fort Langley. Above the Fraser River, Kwantlen members drummed and sang before the march continued.

Following is an email synopsis of a Sooke, BC, Council meeting with Kinder Morgan by a Dogwood Initiative organizer:

The toxic bunker fuel that leaked from a ship into Vancouver's English Bay has washed up on the city's popular beach in Kitsilano.

Vancouver police told CBC News that there are visible clumps of oil on the shore at Kits Beach.

What is bunker fuel?

The Canadian Coast Guard said it was notified about a spill generated from an anchor point in English Bay at about 5 p.m. PT Wednesday.

Glaciers will be largely a thing of the past in Western Canada by the end of the century, placing stress on fish such as salmon that thrive in cold water and affecting hydro generation, according to a study by two B.C. researchers.

The recent Vancouver panel discussion on Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything, from which this article took form, was organized weeks before a local Blockadia event took place. By the time the five panelists came together, two had been arrested for defying a court injunction and two were named in a $5.6-million lawsuit for objecting to Kinder Morgan's (KM) planned pipeline through a municipally designated park on Burnaby Mountain.

The B.C. government’s abrupt decision to rescind its approval of a new B.C. treaty commissioner has opened a significant rift with the federal government and aboriginal groups it says it wants to do business with. But the politics and the personalities involved in the reversal have obscured the government’s intention: To back away from the treaty negotiation process it sees as a costly endeavour that has produced precious few results over the past two decades.

Kinder Morgan says its protocols dictate that it report "suspicious activities" like taking photos near its Burnaby Mountain facility, even though the surrounding area is Crown land on which they have no jurisdiction to prohibit photography.

SFU climate change scientist Tim Takaro says he felt "intimidated" when he got a call from Burnaby RCMP earlier this week asking him about photographs he took with Kinder Morgan infrastructure in the background. They also told him they knew he had been to protest rallies that had taken place there a few months earlier.