SAFE INJECTION SITES FOR OIL
Toronto ci t y council voted in favour of a supervised injection site over the summer. Alberta is working on a plan to introduce safe injection sites to combat the fentanyl crisis. Hamilton, Ont., is looking for a place to put a site, and Vancouver is planning one that will be womenonly.
This building boom in supervised injection sites is all based on the idea, which is backed up by years of evidence, that drug addiction may be bad, but unsupervised drug addiction is even worse. This was a concept long ignored by Canadian conservatives. Even as studies piled up showing that lives were being saved by Canada’s first safe injection site in Vancouver, the Harper government never got over its initial objection that it was “a location for sanctioned use of drugs.”
Which brings us to oil pipelines — an issue where the arguments, and the political leanings of the people making them — are conveniently reversed. Canada has a 1.8 million barrel- aday oil addiction. It has an oil industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people. And it also has a political establishment that generally agrees that the industry isn’t sustainable — and that oil should be phased out. But rather than weave all three of these into a nuanced position on how to manage our ocean of oil, it seems the preferred opinion is to meet all new pipelines with the immediate cry of “oil is bad.”
“Any tar sands expansion would significantly contribute to Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions,” reads the Council of Canadians’ info page on Energy East.
“In a context where the Earth’s nations are talking about even more restrictive measures to limit ( greenhouse gas) emissions, we cannot justify the construc- tion of a pipeline,” wrote Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre earlier this year.
“It’s not in Canada’s interest,” said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson of the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which would terminate at the Port of Vancouver. Robertson also dismissed the regulatory process as “flawed and biased” — or, as some other politicians might say, “rigged.”
But just as it is with ignoring intravenous drug use, the end result is worse for everybody. Canadian oil is still getting to market, but by rail. Oil trains consume more energy per barrel of oil moved and are more likely to tip over into rivers and lakes — or destroy a portion of some town’s downtown core.
Meanwhile, there’s the inconvenient fact that, with or without the oil sands, Canada still has a few million internal combustion engines to run for the foreseeable future. What Albertans hear from the rest of the country is: we’ ll keep buying it, but you can’t sell it. It’s sort of like someone scarfing down a cheeseburger while simultaneously trying to promote veganism by outlawing cattle farming.
The leading critique against Canadian oil pipelines, of course, is that Alberta’s oil is “dirty.” And they’re right about it being dirty: Northern Alberta is indeed one of the world’s most energy-intensive places to obtain petroleum.
But the vast majority of carbon emissions still re- sult f rom what happens when that oil is consumed. Even a litre of the world’s “cleanest” oil is still going to be responsible for up to 90 per cent of the life- cycle emissions produced by the world’s “dirtiest” oil.
In a 2014 r eport, t he United States Congressional Research Service crunched the numbers on the “wells to wheels” emissions for oil sands crude. Its conclusion: burning a litre of gasoline refined from Canadian oil was about two to 18 per cent worse than if the oil had come from another foreign supplier.
Eighteen per cent doesn’t seem to be t he kind of spread that would make something a global pariah. It’s about the difference between driving a Honda Civic and a Ford Escape.
There are different arguments to be made when it comes to oil tanker traffic. B.C.’s northern coastal communities aren’t necessarily acting irrationally if they’re reluctant to risk the permanent destruction of marine food sources for a project that offers them little to no long-term benefit.
But that doesn’t explain the rampant opposition to Energy East, or many of the arguments that underpinned the cancellation of Keystone XL.
Toronto has no plans to get its citizens to the Toronto Islands by means other than a diesel- burning ferry. Montreal doesn’t have a scheme to disappear the 160,000 cars that pass over the Jacques Cartier Bridge every day. And yet, it’s ap- parently acceptable to top up the Canadian national gas tank with oil from foreign producers, while sealing off the ports to companies that have the gall to produce it here.
Price carbon if you want to curb oil use. Build light rail if you want to get people out of their cars. But don’t arbitrarily hand pain to an i ndustry responsible f or keeping a province or two in their work clothes. The ideal energy strategy would seem to be one that borrows from the “safe injection” approach: map out an end point for oil, but find a responsible way to manage the needs of the roughnecks and the car drivers in the years that remain. Instead, we’re getting the worst of all worlds: a landscape of oil trains and a country kicking cash to foreign oil companies, while stubbornly kneecapping its own.
You can dislike oil. You can actively plan for a future without i t. You can even dream of a time when Fort McMurray, Alta., will be a Barkerville- style ghost town filled with Parks Canada staff re- enacting the 1 990s. But t hat doesn’ t mean you get to live in a reality where Mississaugans will start taking the train to work if you can just block enough pipelines.
For years, conservatives embraced a reality in which addicts would simply quit heroin if the experience was made unpleasant enough. But addiction doesn’t work that way, and the only result was an HIV and overdose epidemic that didn’t need to happen. Similarly, the reasonable activist needs to take a good, long look at a country that, for a considerable time to come, is going to continue to be dependent on oil.
We can either manage that oil safely in a way that minimizes harm, or we can hide the stash and see what happens.
WE CAN EITHER MANAGE THAT OIL SAFELY IN A WAY THAT MINIMIZES HARM, OR WE CAN HIDE THE STASH AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.