The Cat is Out of the Bag: Shutting Down Pipelines Is Way Easier Than Anyone Thought

After a years-long, hard-fought campaign against Line 9, which employed a diversity of tactics, from lobbying to legal battles to direct action, Line 9 transported crude to a refinery in Montreal on December 3, 2015.

On December 7, we shut it down. Literally. Most media reported that Enbridge shut down Line 9 as a “precautionary measure”, but we know better. We closed the valve manually. This is historic: to our
knowledge, this is the first time that activists have manually shut down a pipeline. Who would have thought that it be so simple?

The day of the action, Enbridge stock plunged 8 percent. For a company worth almost 60 Billion dollars, that`s about 4.8 Billion dollars. Take that, ya malignant scum!

There is a definite sense of exuberance following this action. One of the notable successes is how this action, which many people would consider radical, enjoyed broad support. This lockdown was organized by anarchists, but was publicly supported by citizens’ groups, including the ex-mayor of the town where it took place.

This whole action was a test of Canada`s new anti-terrorism law C-51, which expands the definition of terrorism to include tampering with critical infrastructure, specifically naming pipelines. Our line of
thinking was this: If they charged us with terrorism, what they’d be saying is that a large segment of the population supports terrorism, and the state would lose the usefulness of the terrorism label to demonize
an isolated political element. It wouldn’t be in their interests, but it would be good for our movement, since in all likelihood, once C-51 is tested in court it will (eventually) get thrown out as unconstitutional.