Dangerous project
Where to start with rebutting the wrongheaded editorial (“Pipeline spat descends into farce,” Citizen, May, 24) critiquing Horgan’s challenge to petulant Notley’s attempt to extort B.C. to accept a filthy dangerous project that could so harm the coastal environment? Perhaps with the false comparison of the benefit BC makes of the existing Kinder Morgan pipeline and its contents, versus the nature and purpose of its evil twin. The existing pipeline carries crude oil, semi-refined and refined products in a series in the same pipeline in what is known as “batching.”
Some of this feeds into the Burnaby refinery, a step of further processing that even many of the new pipeline’s most committed opponents agree is a step in the right direction.
The Evil Twin Pipeline in contrast, is purposed at export and carrying a different product which, as recognized by expert authorities, (not opinionated locals), is distinct from conventional crude oil, both in what we know and what we don’t on possible environmental effects, especially in marine waters. So there is nothing nonsensical or inconsistent about Horgan wanting the legal fulfillment of delivery of product through the existing pipeline, yet objecting to a new pipeline whose product and purposes are very different.
The second misleading conflation in the editorial is that what Alberta is doing and what B.C. is doing are somehow equivalent. Horgan is mounting opposition through the perfectly legal mechanism of asking for a court reference (review).
If he had no legal right to do this, we know that the unholy alliance of Notley, Trudeau, and Kinder Morgan would be blocking him. They have not really tried to stop B.C.’s action because it is legal and indeed, many would say, essential given the widely-known defects in the decision process that gave the new pipeline the green light, a process “streamlined” (AKA gutted) by Harper and now, ironically, being rehabilitated by Trudeau.
Notley, on the other hand, after the mean-spirited and extraneous boycott attempt on B.C. wine, has come up with legislation, thinking Alberta has the right and authority to cut off existing flows to B.C.
I won’t comment on whether this potentially breaches existing contractual business obligations, though that is quite probable.
However, the constitutional overreach is pretty clear. Section 92(a) of the Constitution Act allows provinces to make laws about export of what is called “primary production.” But the product in the existing pipeline is what is called a “batch train” comprising crude, semi-refined and refined product.
Whether Kinder Morgan is prepared to alter that batching in response to Notley’s shenanigans remains to be seen. But unless it does Notley is way out of bounds and she is even more so because the Constitution Act in Section 92 A(2) states that any provincial laws on export “may not authorize for discrimination in prices or in supplies exported to another part of Canada.”
That is why Horgan not only has the right, but the responsibility to use the court to block the desperate and vindictive actions of Notley and her cabal.
Norman Dale, Prince George