B.C.'s Finance Minister Kevin Falcon is quoted as saying, "I think we have to be very worried about the fact that foreign money is going into lobbying efforts against British Columbia and Canada's economic interests."
Foreign money. Yes, we should be very worried about the modest amounts that a few B.C. environmental organizations receive while overlooking the many millions that Enbridge received from - wait for it - foreign sources (such as Chinese, European and American-based energy corporations) to finance their public relations campaign supporting the pipeline, including full-page ads in the Globe and Mail as well as large ads in northern B.C. papers.
In other words, it is oh-so-fine for money of big foreign-based corporations to be used to support Enbridge (acting of course in B.C's and Canada's best economic interests) while hypocritically dissing foreign money that contributes a portion of the budgets of B.C. organizations that are seeking to present what they see as environmental problems with the proposed pipeline.
I am so happy that Minister Falcon (as well as the Prime Minister and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, on whose bandwagon the B.C. minister has recently climbed aboard) know the real economic interest of the province and the nation.
Obviously that interest means pushing the expansion of the largest and most environmentally destructive industrial project on earth and thus depleting this nonrenewable resource that takes inordinate amounts of
water and natural gas inputs to extract, never mind the pollution of Alberta's
waterways and serious damage to the health of the mainly aboriginal people living downstream.
It also means shipping the raw material abroad together with the all those refining jobs as well as sucking up massive taxpayers subsidies to the tar sands that will not be available for sustainable energy projects.
I suggest that the economic interests that would be generously enhanced by the proposed pipeline are those of Enbridge, the Canadian- and foreign-based energy companies involved in the tar sands and the shipping and spinoff companies involved, not the interests of most people that live in B.C. as well as the rest of Canada.
George Harding
Prince George
