Kitimat has provided a cryptic six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other answer for the fraught and polarized issue of the Northern Gateway pipeline. On Tuesday, Kitimat`s council voted 4-1 to join the chorus of nays against the Enbridge project based on the 58.4 per cent of residents who voted against the pipeline during a municipal referendum held April 12.
Council`s decision notwithstanding, the April referendum was a non-binding vote of little clear consequence, held three years after the fed`s joint review panel visited the city to conduct hearings on whether or not to approve the pipeline. Indeed, one could argue the referendum`s primary purpose was to allow Kitimat`s municipal politicians to remain blissfully neutral during the whole approval circus; regardless, the vote took place well after it could have affected the joint review panel`s decision, delivered late last year, to recommend approval of the $6.5 billion pipeline that would ship tarsands bitumen and condensate between Alberta and Kitimat.
It is also highly unlikely the vote will affect the federal government, which is expected to ultimately decide whether to give the go-ahead to the Northern Gateway near the end of June. Nothing gets Tory tails wagging harder than the prospect of the Northern Gateway pipeline freeing Alberta oil captive to the discount purgatory of Middle America and a U.S. market soon to be further flooded with shale petroleum. A bunch of people putting up their hands in a northern B.C. town isn`t going to change that.
And yet the Kitimat vote means Enbridge`s quixotic quest for a so-called social licence to build Northern Gateway has gotten a bit more quixoticky.
No doubt sticking in pipeline firm's craw, according to the Globe and Mail, several Kitimat councillors voiced support for newspaper mogul David Black`s plan to build a refinery and pipeline to the oilsands through B.C., a scheme whose primary competitive advantage seems to it has neither the name Enbridge or Northern Gateway attached to it. It seems the further along the process Enbridge goes, the better Black`s business case gets.
For Enbridge`s part, the firm was always in trouble with the April vote. The best the firm could hope for was an overwhelming majority, which anti-pipeline opponents were already lining up to discredit.
The referendum's legitimacy was questioned from the start because it cut out nearby Haisla First Nations who lived in Kitimaat Village, a federal Indian reserve that's outside municipal boundaries.
And there were cries Enbridge was trying to buy votes with a campaign the Globe and Mail detailed consisted of around $10,000 in print and radio ads as well as door knocking from Enbridge supporters. Skeena-Bulkley Valley MP and vehement pipeline opponent Nathan Cullen went so far as to tell the Citizen the vote was "heavily tainted" with Enbridge's money.
Cullen's tune probably changed about the same time a Haisla demonstration at Kitimat's City Centre Mall turned, according to CTV, into a celebration of drumming, signing and dancing when the yes vote came in. After that the NDP MP told CTV the referendum was "one of the most powerful grassroots things I have ever been associated with."
Perhaps Cullen shouldn't have been so skittish; he's carried Kitimat for the NDP in every election since 2004, so it's not surprising the anti-pipeline camp found sympathetic ears. But while Kitimat is enjoying the benefits - and suffering some growing pains - from the expansion at Rio Tinto Alcan and the prospects of LNG, it had stood to benefit arguably more than most from the pipeline since it would be the port that would transfer the oilsands cargo onto tankers.
While Enbridge maintained a cheery front, the fact the company couldn't sell its pipeline to a reasonably receptive audience was another stinging loss in the ongoing public relations fiasco that is Northern Gateway.
To compound matters, it also managed to invigorate a near folk movement in the Douglas Channel Watch, an ecogroup the Globe and Mail said started its Kitimat campaign with $200 in the bank and little organization and ended up raising $14,000 to capture almost 60 per cent of the vote. It's not the grassroots Enbridge hoped for when it began its pipeline push and now activists are hoping to pull an HST with a province-wide referendum campaign.
It's doubtful they`ll be able to gather the required 10 per cent of voters in every riding in the province to trigger such a vote, which translates, according to the Tyee, into roughly 300,000 signatures that must be collected in 90 days. But there is a website, letbcvote.ca, and the tantalizing prospect for ecogroups that, if Kitimat is any indication, they would be heavily favoured to triumph in a B.C.-wide pipeline referendum.
A Northern Gateway vote of that nature would be a throbbing headache for the B.C. Liberals. The controversial project has been a useful tool for Premier Christy Clark, allowing her to show toughness and the smatterings of green sympathies during the Joint Review Panel and in her dealings with her Alberta counterpart Alison Redford while enabling her to tout her resource development credentials with her wispy five conditions for OK'ing the project. Her government has kept all sides of the debate just dissatisfied enough with the Liberal stance but giving even grudging acceptance to the project would be complicated considerably by outward hostility from Kitimat, the pipeline's western terminus.
