The editorial "Horgan holds losing hand on pipeline" (Feb. 16) got the broad strokes of the story on the current Trans Mountain pipeline battle right, with its bullies and scoundrels and the misguided, futile political calculations. But the casting is backwards.
The villain or rather villains of the piece is not John Horgan who, unlike the political leadership of Alberta and Canada, is insisting that the risks, known and not, of transporting unprecedented filth from the tar-sands through the lands and waters of British Columbia, needs to be more closely scrutinized.
Horgan is honouring internationally-recognized principles that Canada has signed on to but given little but lip service to. One is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which prescribes aboriginal concurrence with, not mere consultation about major development projects. It is very clear that the majority of B.C. First Nations have not concurred with Kinder-Morgan's project. Horgan is also in line with idea of the precautionary principle enshrined in major international treaties. This says, don't surge ahead with a poorly understood technology for which harm prevention and mitigation is highly uncertain. Err on the side of protecting the natural environment.
The bumbling bad guy in all this is in Ottawa and the bully, as we have seen so clearly in the vindictive and probably illegal wine boycott, is Rachel Notley. The pathetic thing about of her strident pro-pipeline malevolence is, as the editorial implies, she is playing the heavy to win in the 2019 Alberta election. But then, she will face a far more genuine and with a convincing oily villain, Stephen Harper protg, Jason Kenny. I would happily bet The Citizen one year's subscription that in 2019, whatever petty anti-B.C. histrionics Notley performs, she will be throttled at the polls as Alberta returns to the natural rule of the fossil fuel-addicted right.
Nor, contrary to the editorial, is Justin Trudeau likely to get much other than grief at the polls for his cynically political support for a pipeline that puts pay to his sunny rhetoric about reducing greenhouse gasses. Most of Trudeau's B.C. ridings are in the Lower Mainland and along the coast where public opinion is sensibly against a seven-fold increase of super tankers winding 80 tortuous miles to and from the open sea, through the islands and narrows of the Salish Sea/Burrard Inlet.
No, by doing the right thing in terms of both environmental protection and respect for First Nations, Horgan is likely to solidify and expand electoral support in the most populous ridings of the province. It may well be that because of Ottawa's paramount constitutional powers that the hand he is playing will be a losing one, at least in terms of what courts are likely to rule if it comes to that. But let's not get confused on who the good guy and the bad guys are in this High Noon-like drama.
Norman Dale
Prince George
