Bill will bring tanker talk to the House [editorial]

Hat’s off to Nathan Cullen, Member of Parliament for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, who has tabled a private members bill in the House of Commons called An Act to Defend the Pacific Northwest. It’s a piece of proposed legislation that will ban supertankers from transporting oil across the North Coast of British Columbia, a rugged and infinitely beautiful part of the world that could be left dripping in bitumen and chemicals if even one of these transports bursts a seam, runs ashore or afoul of the jagged rocks in a storm.

The act will “fully and finally stop the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline in its tracks,” reads a backgrounder provided by the MP. No sense running 1,100 km of pipe from Alberta’s oil sands to the coast, if you can’t ship it off to foreign buyers by tanker.

The pipeline will be built through rivers and streams and sensitive rainforest. It will carry, if built, 525,000 barrels of bitumen per day. The act would legislate protection of the BC North Coast from oil tanker traffic and, from what we have been reading, Cullen seems to have a widely diverse group of supporters for it.

“This region is one of the most environmentally, culturally and historically important areas in our country – and some of the most difficult waters in the world, with waves up to 26 metres high and winds up to 185km/h.” Once the pipeline reaches its end point, 11,000 supertankers will collect the product and carry it through B.C.’s waters for export.

A declaration signed by 130 First Nations states opposition to this pipeline/supertanker mix. Municipalities along the coast have also been opposed. “Thousands of people wrote letters and testified before the Northern Gateway joint review panel, municipalities and the province of British Columbia formally declared their opposition.” Cullen says 60 per cent of all British Columbians are opposed to Northern Gateway, and all their voices have been ignored by the Harper Conservatives in their push to open new markets for the oil sands.

“By shutting out and insulting First Nations and BC communities, the Conservatives have made a complete mess of this process,” said Cullen. “They’re failing to look at the long-term economic and environmental impact of Northern Gateway, and that’s what this bill aims to finally fix.”

The people of this region are no stranger to the long-term impact of oil spills, having to clean up their shorelines after the Exxon Valdez spilled 257,000 barrels of oil when it struck Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef in 1989. “Big globs of oil–they call them patties–arrived on our beaches,” reads one account from a clean-up crew more than 1,700 km away from the spill. “We had to use shovels and had to pick some of them up by hand.” The patties were put into special bags and airlifted out of the community by helicopter. That’s the thing about oil spills. They tend to spread widely when the response time is not immediate.

In August, 400 plywood drift cards stamped with “This could be oil” were thrown into the Fraser River to demonstrate how far oil might travel if it spilled out of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, and within 50 minutes the cards had travelled three and a half kilometres downstream. Last October, a drift card, dropped along an oil tanker route that runs from Burrard Inlet at Vancouver as part of similar exercise, was picked up in Haida Gwaii, more than 1,000 km from where it was dropped.

The remote location of the Exxon Valdez spill made response complicated. And things haven’t changed for this part of the world.

During meetings of municipalities on the west coast a year or so ago, delegates were told that there were just 13 people in the province trained to respond to oil spills, and the response time to an oil spill in the north (think Hecate Strait between Haida Gwaii and mainland BC) would be 72 hours from when the spill was detected. There were no details given as to what that response would be.

Beginning mid-October, Cullen will be travelling B.C. on a “Take Back Our Coast” tour. A pipeline spill or tanker accident would be disastrous, with 45,000 fisheries and tourism jobs in British Columbia affected “or wiped out forever,” reads Cullen’s web material for the tour.

This tour will allow people to have a say on the private members Bill “and the future of our coast and country.”

This is what an election issue looks like folks. And with this Bill, Cullen is standing MPs up to record which side of history they will be on. Clever Mr. Cullen.

Windspeaker