Growing fuss over pipelines is hard to comprehend
The rather enchanting Liu Yongfeng spoke the simplistic truth we Canadians are loath to admit.
“This is a country with great natural resources and China is a country which needs those resources. We can be good partners,” said the sadly soon-to-depart Chinese consul general based in our city.
She was answering concerns several weeks ago about the growing influence and investment of China, particularly in the oilpatch, but her words unintentionally touch on a deeper truth beyond our relationship with Asia’s growing superpower.
The past, present and future of our massive country is tied to the earth — what we dig out of it and what we grow upon it.
So it likely puzzles Liu — though she is too polite to ever comment — when people across this country hold protests over pipelines.
It’s an odd target for such venom. After all, beneath the Alberta soil, there are already 400,000 kilometres of them — enough to wrap the globe 10 times over.
Once they were laid without fuss and formed the underground network that silently transformed this province from a virtual colony of Central Canada to the economic engine of today that’s racing into the future and dragging a half-hearted nation in its wake.
Yet seemingly overnight these pipelines — to some — have become evil, dangerous and downright nasty.
Last weekend, protests were held across the country slamming both the development of the Alberta oilsands and the accompanying expansion of pipelines to deal with the increasing output.
Dozens of B.C. environmental groups protested Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which, while still in its planning infancy, looks to eventually send half a million barrels of oil a day to the West Coast for shipment out of Kitimat.
Meanwhile, in Toronto — that city whose astounding civic governance is rightly famous worldwide — more protesters did that cute human pipeline chain thingy to illustrate their feelings toward reversing the flow of an existing line, this one aiming to take Alberta crude eastward.
South of the border, the various media groupies and Hollywood has-beens are taking a short break from fighting TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline as they try to figure how to sign up for Obamacare. Once they finish trying to square that circle, they’ll return with a vengeance.
That’s a lot of noise and fury over some underground pipe.
But it’s what comes from living in an economic cloud cuckoo land, where people stuffing their collective mouths full of cake mumble protests about sugar content.
Pipelines, or what flows through them, are where we make the big money in this country. It is where we will make even bigger money in the future. Unless, of course, the protests succeed and we decide, “Oh, what the heck, let’s shut ‘em all down.”
Then we’ll look to our high-tech industries. But sadly, they’re not hiring at BlackBerry these days as it follows that earlier national giant, Nortel, into the digital scrap heap. There’s always General Motors, of course, although one has to wonder where the Canadian government got the tax money to buy up so many of the shares and keep those Oshawa plants open.
We are a small population in a massive country; one blessed with huge natural resources. We have become adept at mining, growing and transporting those resources. That, together with a huge market on our doorstep, has made us rich.
They could make us richer still with China and others hungry for more. Such trade would provide the future tax receipts to governments and jobs to individuals, which in turn, secure the health care, education and pensions we rely upon.
Instead, we bang drums, link arms and sing songs of protest.
Liu, when she takes up her next posting, may find that hard to explain to her diplomatic colleagues. In that, she would not be alone.