Let calm reason, not rhetoric, prevail on Gateway
The proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, intended to funnel heavy oil from northern Alberta through the Rocky Mountains to the British Columbia coast, could turn out to be one of two things.
According to opposing camps speaking at National Energy Board hearings on the project’s feasibility, it could be either a hefty economic boost for this country or a catastrophic ecological disaster.
To weigh the pros and cons of the $5.5-billion project, the federal government has commendably allowed 18 months for study, including public hearings for which more than 4,000 individuals and organizations have submitted briefs and requests to give testimony.
Less commendable was the government’s blunderbuss
attack on the project’s critics even before the hearings began. On the eve of the opening session last week, Energy Minister Joe Oliver unleashed an open letter accusing foreign-funded “radical” environmental groups whose minions include “jet-setting celebrities” of plotting to hijack Canada’s regulatory system to the detriment of our national economy.
This is rich, not to mention hypocritical, considering that
oil-business interests that will make the case in favour of the development are also in large part foreign-financed.
Furthermore, Canadian firms and the Canadian government invested heavily last year in seeking – unsuccessfully – to sway U.S. policy-makers to approve the Keystone XL pipeline project for shipping Canadian crude to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
When this was raised with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a CBC interview this week, Harper avoided the question and instead launched a renewed attack on U.S. environmental activists who “would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America.”
Such demagogy is unhelpful in the evaluation of such a vital matter.
But equally unhelpful are over-the-top apocalyptic assertions of environmental ravages that some of the project’s opponents claim are inevitable if it goes ahead.
There are rational arguments both for and against the project. They must be considered with cool heads on the basis of empirical evidence.
On the one hand, Northern Gateway would be a tremendous boost to
Canada’s vital petroleum industry, in that it would allow for a profitable diversification in the international marketing of the resource (just about all exports of which now flow south of the border). It would create hundreds of long-term jobs and add more than $130 billion to the national economy over the next two decades.
That is reliably estimated to include more than $27 billion in tax revenue that would go a long way to funding schools, hospitals and other social services – things that people with environmental concerns also tend to favour.
On the other hand, there is the possibility that a pipeline break or a tanker spill in the ocean off the B.C. coast could cause major destruction to the land, waters and wildlife in the affected area.
Subsidiaries of Enbridge Inc., the projected builder of the facility, recorded no less than 170 pipeline spills over the past decade, some minor, but also including what U.S. authorities rated the worst spill in the history of the Midwest: the 2010 pipeline rupture near Marshall, Mich., that sent 20,000 barrels of oil gushing into a nearby creek and the Kalamazoo River.
Opponents of the pipeline include not only radical eco-activists, but people like veteran petroleum geologist David Hughes, who was for 32 years a senior geologist with the federal government. Hughes will present a critical study at the hearings. As he said in a Gazette interview this week, the project risks creating an excessive depletion of our non-renewable petroleum resources that could threaten the country’s long-term energy security.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision Wednesday to put Keystone XL on indefinite hold was made for purely political reasons, not on the merits or demerits of the project.
As such, it should not have a decisive bearing on evaluation of the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal.
It somewhat strengthens the economic argument in favour of the Northern Gateway line, but does nothing to dispel or confirm the environmental risks the project entails. Even Enbridge officials have said that the U.S. move should not sway the Canadian judgment one way or the other.
The potential returns from the project are of huge importance, but then so are the possible hazards. Both need to be weighed against each other in an atmosphere of rational analysis, not overheated rhetoric.
Both sides in this debate should take that to heart for the greater good of all Canadians.
