By Maurice Switzer
It’s so much easier to keep things simple.
So please don’t talk to me about diluted bitumen having a viscosity of 201 Centistrokes, compared with 5 for conventional crude oil.
It means little to me that oil companies use “steam-assisted gravity drainage” to extract bitumen out of the Alberta tarsands, or that TransCanada Corporation has over $48 billion in assets and operates a network of 57,000 kilometres of wholly-owned pipelines.
Whenever a major issue hits the headlines – such as TransCanada’s proposal to pump 1.1 million barrels a day of “DilBit” from Alberta some 4600 kilometres east to marine ports in New Brunswick – members of the general public can brace themselves for an onslaught of rhetoric and statistics that muddies the waters of comprehension.
The $12- billion Energy East scheme involves converting an existing natural gas pipeline, as well as building some new ones so Alberta petroleum businesses can sell their product to oil-thirsty countries like India and China.
On one side we have those who think that creating more financial wealth is the most important thing that a society can accomplish. Their numbers deal with dollars, forecasting another $10 billion in tax revenues and 10,000 jobs just from getting Energy East up and running. Include Stephen Harper in that camp. The Prime Minister’s official website says his political priority is Canada’s economy. (It also says he moved to Calgary from Toronto in 1978 to work in the petroleum industry -- Imperial Oil, to be precise.)
On the other side are those who want to live in a Canada that does not have a wallet for a heart. Their numbers relate to the human costs of such mega-projects, and they see Energy East as a big accident just waiting to happen.
“It’s a form of insanity” environmental champion Maude Barlow told an audience in North Bay, a community whose only source of safe drinking water – Trout Lake – is a stone’s throw from the Energy East pipeline. A so-called “minimal-risk” pipeline spill could irreversibly pollute that watershed.
The Council of Canadians chairperson is one of the most visible opponents of what she says is the Harper government’s master plan to make oil products the lifeblood of her nation. Barlow sees Harper’s pipe dreams as part of the same political agenda as the omnibus legislation that removed federal oversight of two million lakes and rivers in Canada, and has started taking the teeth out of environmental regulations.
Supporters in her tent include assorted environmentalists, who use numbers like 218 – the number of spills per 10,000 miles of pipeline in Alberta between 2001 and 2010 that resulted from internal corrosion. And that’s the province where all the oil industry experts live!
They point to disasters like the 2010 rupture of a tar sands pipeline in Michigan that spilled 840,000 gallons of DilBit into the Kalamazoo River. It took 12 hours for Enbridge to shut down the pipeline, and 19 hours to notify emergency responders that they might consider visiting a scene where DilBit vapours could form an ignitable and explosive mixture in the air, or form hydrogen sulfide and suffocate the surrounding population. Subsequent health reports found that 60 per cent of people living in the spill vicinity have experienced respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological symptoms “consistent with acute exposure to benzene and other petroleum-related chemicals.”
The information from both camps is interesting; much of it is contradictory; all of it is overwhelming.
These are times to return to basic principles.
- We cannot live without clean air.
- We cannot live without clean water.
- Providing safety for their citizens is a prime mandate of ALL levels of government – municipal, provincial, federal. That’s why we have police and fire departments, emergency services and armies.
No citizens of any jurisdiction should be placed in a position where they have to plead with their governments to provide them safe living environments. There should not be a need for 300 people to show up at a public meeting – as they did on two occasions in North Bay – to voice concerns that their elected representatives are supporting projects that pose real and present danger to public safety.
The Energy East pipeline would cross the traditional lands of 50 First Nations, whose interests have not been consulted and accommodated as required by domestic law and international protocols. The pipeline issue is wending its way up the long to-do list for First Nations organizations, battered but far from beaten by Harper government budget cuts designed to silence them on issues like how to share the wealth from natural resources extracted in a sustainable fashion.
In her wonderful book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, Potawotami author Robin Wall-Kimmerer talks about “the gift economy”, whereby humans were provided all we need to survive – air, food, water – by Creator. With modern technology we can even transform light and heat from the sun, the power of the wind and the strength of running water into energy to provide us with all the comforts of home. And these were all gifts.
But everything has evolved into a “market economy”, where original gifts like berries, sap from the trees, even the beauty of flowers, have become commodities for sale.
Not content to commoditize everything above the earth, mankind has resorted to drilling holes and defacing the planet to look for possible riches beneath the soil.
There’s a famous quotation, often attributed as a “Native American prophecy”, which goes: “ When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”
That’s simple enough for me to understand.
Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He serves as director of communications for the Union of Ontario Indians and editor of The Anishinabek News – www.anishinabeknews.ca
