The protest will involve hanging banners off a series of highway overpasses and waving at traffic (ferry traffic from Vancouver and the Gulf Islands will be traveling directly under us at regular intervals).
When: Saturday July 21st, 2012, 10:00 am ~ all day.
Where: Three pedestrian overpasses between the Swartz Bay Ferry Terminal and McTavish Rd in the Sidney area. https://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=209152384087759845313.0004c1bc9cada889cfc38&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=48.66217,-123.42453&spn=0.089118,0.128918&t=m&z=13&vpsrc=6&ei=ljvOT6GYIoOaiALe_sjmAQ&pw=2
Why: The Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline Project is a proposed 1,770 km pipeline shipping crude oil sands bitumen from Brunderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia. In Kitimat, the bitumen will be loaded onto supertankers and shipped to Asia. Why do I disagree?
1. There has been a moratorium on oil tanker traffic along the BC coast since 1972 due to the extreme dangers of navigating these waters. Hecate Strait, for example, has been called the ‘fourth most dangerous body of water in the world’ by Environment Canada. To give you an idea of this, John Vaillant describes the strait in his book, “The Golden Spruce” as, “a malevolent weather factory; on a regular basis its unique combination of wind, tide, shoals, and shallows produce a kind of destructive synergy that has few parallels elsewhere in nature.” A weather buoy in the the strait has registered waves over 100 ft high. To propose to put bitumen-loaded supertankers of unprecedented size through these passages over 200 times a year is reckless and disturbing. Although Enbridge has agreed to a number of (“voluntary”) safety measures such as tug escorts and ship vetting, Enbridge does not own or control the tankers.
2. The pipeline would be another step back for Canada in fighting climate change. Further development of the Alberta oil sands and encouragement of fossil fuel use will only aggravate the climate change trend.
3. Economically, extracting oil from the oil sands as fast as humanely possible and exporting it crude to places like China is unreasonable, seeing as we still import over half of our oil from countries such as Venezuela and Nigeria. Selling it overseas will contribute to driving the price of oil up in Canada.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised China that this project would go through before the BC government gave the go ahead. We have to show BC Premier Christy Clark that we do not want this pipeline to go through.
2. It’s not too late late for written submissions to the Northern Gateway (Enbridge Pipeline) environmental review panel.
Information on what to submit and how to submit it is on this site: http://gatewaypanel.review-examen.gc.ca/clf-sni/fq/hrngrdrq-eng.html (with many other links from this page). The deadline is August 31,2012.
This is an especially important opportunity for anyone who has specific, technical, scientific, environmental, historical info but also for anyone with an opinion.
Can’t quite think of how to word it? How about getting together for a submission-writing party?
