Actress Tantoo Cardinal among dozen women protesting expansion of Trans Mountain pipeline

Actress Tantoo Cardinal (Dances with Wolves) was among a dozen or so women in West Vancouver  March 22 to protest the expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline. The women were primarily Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam First Nations members. Greenpeace campaigners joined them. The Wall of Woman gathered at the Welcome Figure at Ambleside Beach to tell Kinder Morgan the expansion is not welcome in the territory. The proposed expansion will see Kinder Morgan’s output almost tripled to 890,000 barrels from the current 300,000 barrels of diluted bitumen per day. The proposal is before the National Energy Board. Tanker traffic in Burrard Inlet will increase from five tankers to about 34 tankers each month. Cardinal told a reporter for the North Shore News that she has a lot of respect for First Nations and their efforts to protect the water and marine life. “I really think that any way that we can stand there and try to make so much of the world realize that water is important, (is) definitely important,” she said. “There’s a huge contingency of people who don’t really breathe that in very well.”