Anti-pipeline protesters fail in bid to meet MP
Group shows up at Kelowna office of Stephen Fuhr to make point only to learn he’s in Ottawa
The entire premise of an antipipeline protest Friday in Kelowna was to present local MP Stephen Fuhr with a bottle of precious, threatened water.
Problem was, the Liberal MP for Kelowna-Lake Country wasn’t at his constituency office at 1420 St. Paul St. downtown. He was in Ottawa. After whipping the crowd of 60 placard-carrying protesters into a frenzy with chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Kinder Morgan’s got to go,” rally organizer Korry Zepik sent a supporter into Fuhr’s office to announce they’d be coming in.
The supporter was back by Zepik’s side within a minute reporting the MP’s absence.
“Fuhr’s not here. He’s in Ottawa,” Zepik blurted to the gathering.
“That’s too bad. I wanted to have eye contact with the man to tell him this.”
And then Zepik began reading a letter addressed to Fuhr.
“We have come to your office to request you ask the prime minister to reconsider his approval of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline,” read Zepik.
“It should not be built for an overwhelming number of reasons. And each one of those reasons alone, by themselves, is ample and just cause for this pipeline to not be built.”
Zepik then outlined nine points covering how the pipeline is bad for the economy, society and the environment.
All the while, Zepik held a bottle of water from Burrard Inlet that he collected after being arrested twice at protests at Burnaby Mountain, the terminus of the yetto-be-expanded pipeline.
It’s the same bottle that was to be presented to Fuhr, a symbol of a resource that could be sullied if the pipeline bursts or a tanker loaded with oilsands diluted bitumen from the pipeline leaks or crashes.
The rally was originally billed as a Protect the Water event, one of several demonstrations in cities across the country organized by LeadNow.
The movement quickly became an anti-pipeline protest, because the pipeline poses a threat to water and land.
The federal government has approved the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which would triple capacity of oilsands diluted bitumen travelling from Edmonton to Burnaby to be loaded onto ocean tankers.
While the pipeline has Ottawa’s OK, Zepik said it will probably never be built. “It’s not going to happen,” he said. “There’s too much opposition. The B.C. government, Burnaby and Indigenous communities have all taken it to court and none of those cases is settled yet.”