Liberals left with dead duck
Dear editor: The Liberals passed Bill C48 last spring which imposed a tanker moratorium on the north Pacific coast. This buttressed their 2016 decision against the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat and their choice for the expanded TransMountain pipeline to Burnaby.
Their aim was to shut down any possibility of pipelines reaching the north Pacific from the Alberta oil sands as expressed in Justin Trudeau’s imperious declaration, “the Great Bear Rainforest is no place for pipelines.” But, as Yogi Berra said, “it ain’t over till it’s over”.
The Lax Kw’alaams Indian Band is proposing the Eagle Spirit Pipeline from Alberta to Prince Rupert. It essentially replaces the aborted Northern Gateway, except that it would carry refined crude instead of bitumen. Many other First Nations along the route are on board and would have an equity share in the project.
The Lax Kw’alaams are contesting Trudeau’s tanker moratorium to make their plan feasible. As a contingency, they’re planning to use tanker loading facilities at Hyder, Alaska, should the tanker moratorium be upheld. This foresees oil tankers using the Dixon Passage to reach open ocean.
This would be yet another Gordian knot as it involves a welter of conflicting interests between pro and con First Nations, the environmental lobby, and the B.C., Alberta and federal governments.
It will also keep the Liberals between a rock and a hard place as they balance their declining fortunes against the accommodations which they’ve tried to cultivate with the indigenous community at great expense. It would also refresh the dispute between the U.S. and Canada over who controls the Dixon Passage.
There’s a whole other discussion to be had about the extent to which a small segment of the Indigenous population should be able to take actions that impact the entire country. Most of us have never heard of the Lax Kw’alaams, but maybe we should be cheering for them on this one.
The Liberals now own Trans-Mountain, but it’s a dead duck. It almost looks like a decision that was engineered to fail. Northern Gateway would have been the smarter choice. At least the Liberals didn’t need to buy it to run it into a hornet’s nest of complications in Burnaby.
For Eagle Spirit to be a possibility it would require pragmatic political leadership to repeal the tanker moratorium. And it would take a change of government to restore the confidence of the investment community. John Thompson Kaleden