Long before disaster struck, the 5,900 residents of Lac-Mégantic had grown accustomed to the sight of large oil tankers rolling through their small, tightly knit community in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. A shortage of oil pipelines in North America had created a new kind of railway industry traversing the continent. In just a few years, tankers carrying crude oil from the resource-rich West had grown from a mere 8,000 in 2009 to nearly 400,000, and Lac-Mégantic is located along one of the main routes to refineries in the East.
There are two ways to look at Canada's oil wealth, found mostly in Alberta's oilsands deposits. One is to be amazed that Alberta has more than 170 billion barrels of oil - an immense resource by any yardstick. The other is to question what it all means. Will it have an effect on the global supply of oil, is Canada going to be able to sell it in the future, and how does the rest of the world view Canada - and its oil? Game changer. Oil is found just about everywhere on the planet.
Rosa Parks famously occupied the seat of a Montgomery bus, an action that sparked a revolution in U.S. racial relations. The Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en now defiantly occupies territory whose location is critical to a proposed new pipeline route. They experience daily surveillance by helicopters that sometimes buzz close over the main cabin of the occupation.
One would have hoped that Canada's newest and largest private sector union – UNIFOR, made up of the former Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) unions – would have been out front in the growing movement against Enbridge's Line 9 pipeline reversal. This key new organization of Canada's working-class needs to join First Nations, environmental activists, young people, Occupy veterans, other unionists and working people in communities across Ontario in organizing to demand that Line 9 be stopped.
An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people rallied in Vancouver on November 16 in opposition to the Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline. It was a strong expression of the ‘wall of opposition’ that the Alberta, BC and federal governments are facing as they try to push through acceptance of the project, including gaining formal approval of the National Energy Board.
Last week, NDP leader Adrian Dix announced his commitment to a "made in B.C." environmental review of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. As an adviser to Dix on this issue, I wish to explain the legal considerations behind this decision. In 2010, the B.C. Liberals signed an "equivalency agreement" with Ottawa, which said, in effect, that an environmental assessment of the Enbridge pipeline and tanker proposal carried out by the Harper government's joint review panel would constitute a B.C. environmental assessment as well.
A pair of Vancouver high school students have written an open letter to Canadian Geographic in protest of the magazine delivering educational materials funded by oil and gas producers to classrooms.
Enclosed are three news articles that review the challenging prospects for Alberta’s tar sands producers. They face a daunting future as rival U.S. oil production surges and opposition grows to the three pipeline routes which they and their pipeline allies are struggling to construct–Keystone XL to the south, Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain to the west, and Energy East to the east.
CONDITION 2 : World-leading marine oil-spill response, prevention and recovery systems for B.C.'s coastline and ocean to manage and mitigate the risks and costs of heavy-oil pipelines and shipments.
A new map (scroll down to view) reveals the full scope of oil and gas pipelines proposed to criss-cross BC. Compiled by Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition and Skeena Wild, the graphic depicts the planned routes for a staggering six new pipelines – five designed to carry natural gas to proposed liquefaction (LNG) plants in Kitimat and Prince Rupert, plus the twin bitumen and condensate Northern Gateway pipeline proposed by Enbridge. Plans for an additional six gas pipelines have yet to be formalized.
