Northwest Coast Energy News will use selected testimony from the Joint Review hearings, where that testimony can easily turned into a web post. Testimony referring to documents, diagrams or photographs will usually not be posted if such references are required. Depending on workload, testimony may be posted sometime after it originally occurred. Posting will be on the sole editorial judgment of the editor.
By April MacLeod, Walter Thorne and Dennis Horwood
We would first like to thank the Haisla Nation
hosting this hearing. We recognize we are guests on Haisla land and that we are also on Haisla territory. We would also like to thank the JRP for this opportunity to make the oral presentation.
Who is the Kitimat Valley Naturalists? We are an independent Kitimat organization. We’re open to the entire community and we are an active member of B.C. nature. Our goal as a group is to pursue outdoor nature-oriented recreation.
As a group, we have 40 years of bird and mammal records and research papers. We have been involved as stream keepers, working closely with Department of Fisheries and Oceans. And we are also considered by the birding community to be citizen scientists.
We believe we have little to gain and much to lose from an oil pipeline, terminus and tanker traffic, and the purpose of this presentation is to show what we believe we have to — we stand to lose.
The focus of this whole presentation is the Kitimat River estuary and it is one of the five largest estuaries on our northern B.C. Coast. It is ranked by Ducks Unlimited as one of B.C.’s most important estuaries. And to back that up, a technical report showed it was the top three in total biological and social values.
And so everyone is clear, scientists define an estuary as much more than just mudflats and meadows. The Kitimat River estuary in fact extends many kilometres past the inner tidal areas and well into Douglas Channel.
The estuary foreshore is a relatively flat area, and at a distance, its beauty and importance are difficult to see. Up close, however, things change.
The Kitimat River estuary is 1,230 hectares, and in perspective, that’s three times larger than Vancouver’s Stanley Park. It is covered in sitka spruce, western hemlock and deciduous trees, interspersed with lush meadows, slews, ponds and rivulets.
Rich, organic soils, packed with nutrients, help create immense fertile meadows. These meadows and land support the growth of many native species.
In the spring and summer, it is a wildlife — wildflower and wildlife heaven. In early times, the root of the chocolate lily, seen in the insert, was used by the Haisla and early pioneers as a food source.
Shooting stars are just one of the many wildflowers found in the meadows of the estuary. Many people, like me, a local native, native natural photographer, I like to walk around the estuary purely for the floral opportunity of — floral photographic opportunities.
The same nutrients that allow flowers to flourish also support a major outdoor activity, fishing.
Fishers from B.C., Alberta and the world come here to fish. Why? Because Kitimat is really a fishing Mecca.
Kitimat’s river — the Kitimat River brood stock is amongst the best in the world. Where else on this planet can you catch a 27-pound steelhead or a 76-pound Chinook salmon. Elite fly-in fishing lodges located throughout the Douglas Channel target Kitimat River fish.
The B.C. sports fishing industry yields annual returns in the billions of dollars. Kitimat’s share in a year is in the millions.
Kitimat is a 10 out of 10 fishing destination. And if you don’t like our fish, try our prawns. Even celebrities know about this area and come here to fish. When the Vancouver Canucks arrive, they keep it very secret.
The Kitimat and Douglas Channel river systems have attracted recreational anglers for decades, starting in the 1950s, as you can see. Some have an extremely high profile: The Right Honourable Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Kevin Costner, the actor, and Carey Price, a B.C. boy, our goalie for the Montreal Canadiens.
Hunters as well as fishers depend on the Kitimat River estuary. Birds, like fish, are attracted to estuaries. The Kitimat River estuary is a stopover during both the spring and fall migration. Trumpeter swans that nest in Alaska fly here and stay for the winter.
One of the major groups of migrants are waders, long-legged birds that generally feed in the shallow waters and mudflats. Over 20 species of this group of birds use our estuary as a fast-food outlet. They stop, stay for a day or two, then fly on to as far away as South America.
Twenty years ago, great blue herons were a rare bird at any time of the year in the Kitimat Valley. This blue-listed bird, meaning an indigenous species considered vulnerable, has made the Kitimat River estuary its winter refuge. Now these birds are regularly reported on Christmas bird counts.
Snow geese used to be a rare bird here as well. We now record them regularly during spring and fall migrations and in flocks sometimes exceeding 500 individuals. This estuary has become a vital link along their migration route.
Typically, many birds desert the estuary during the summer months, but we still have many species that rely on the estuary trees, meadows and waterways to raise their young.
One of the most mysterious birds in the world lives here. The marbled murrelet, a robin-sized seabird thrives in the Douglas Channel system. These birds feed by day in the rich channel waters, but at nightfall they fly inland to old-growth trees and locate their saucer-sized nest in complete darkness. No scientist, or anyone for that matter, knows how they do this.
The estuary and Douglas Channel have immense recreational values. Sailboats, kayaks and power craft all ply the local waterways. Alaska-bound yachts often divert into Douglas Channel. Why do they come here? They come here for solitude, pristine wilderness, private beaches that urbanites from all over Canada can only dream about.
Author John Kimantas predicts Douglas Channel will evolve into a world- class kayaking destination. He is considered to be the Pacific Coast authority on kayaking.
We are blessed with a network of Haisla cabins that all visitors are welcome to use. These two kayakers visit here every year from Alberta. They keep coming back. Why? They want that wilderness experience.
Within the shelter of Minette Bay, a major part of the estuary, local recreational events such as dragon boat racing and training take place. We have several non-commercial hot springs. Anyone can use them at any time of the year. They’re free.
Ecotourism on the estuary and throughout the Douglas Channel system is second to none. It is simply world class. Where else on the same day can you see three different looking bears on the same day? Lots of places have black bears, but we have Kermode bears and grizzlies a plenty. They love our salmon and we enjoy watching them fish.
Orcas regularly visit here in spring but can be seen at any time. Sea lions come and go with the fish and tides. Seals are always present in the channel, estuary and even the river. They add character and enjoyment for visitors and locals alike.
But nothing — absolutely nothing — beats the sight of a sounding humpback whale. If we lose our whales, we know we will have lost much more.
So in conclusion, the Kitimat Valley Naturalists believe we need to strike harmony and balance in our ecosystem here and, as such, we believe the Northern Gateway is not an acceptable risk. We simply have too much to lose.
The Gitxsan hereditary chiefs have formally rejected the deal signed in December by Elmer Derrick to support the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.
A meeting in Hagwilge Tuesday evening rejected by a vote of 28 to 8 the controversial equity deal.
The vote may also lead to the end of the blockade of the Gitxsan Treaty Society office in Hazelton.
Gitxsan spokesman John Olson told CFJW says there needs to be an all-clans meeting before the blockade is lifted.
“And I say it’s an all clans meeting, that means the Gitxsan Treaty Society members are more than welcome to come out and participate in this meeting, and I think that’s a step in the right direction,” Olson explained.
The chiefs say they want a written acknowledgement from the society that the Enbridge deal is rejected before removing their blockade, which went up shortly after Derrick announced the agreement in early December.
Enbridge Northern Gateway spokesman Paul Stanway issued a statement:
Enbridge has learned that the Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs have reconsidered their prior endorsement of Gitxsan participation as equity partners in our project
While we are disappointed at this shift in stance in relation to our 2009 protocol agreement with the Nation and in relation to 2011 meetings with Hereditary representatives, we respect this decision.
We look forward to receiving written communication from the Gitxsan Hereditary chiefs, so that we have greater clarity in relation to their current perspectives. And we will continue to engage with the Gitxsan Nation in relation to the project.
In the meantime, we will also continue to work and engage with corridor First Nations groups, including the more than 20 groups who in recent weeks have fully executed and endorsed equity participation agreements deals with Enbridge.
KYTX (Tyler, Texas) Reklaw & Gallatin take on TransCanada
(Two tiny East Texas towns are playing “David” against an oil “Goliath” in a meeting scheduled for 6pm Tuesday. )
British Columbia once had the richest, longest-lasting, sustainable oil economy on the planet.
That’s almost all gone now. While the environmental movement loves to quote Joni Mitchell’s “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” the collapse of BC’s oil economy is perhaps the best example in history of what Mitchell meant in her song. Big Yellow Taxi.
British Columbia even supplied much-needed oil to Alberta.
The collapse of that oil economy is a cautionary tale for BC in the debate over the Northern Gateway pipeline. That’s because a pipeline breach near a key river or a tanker disaster on the BC coast would kill the last remnants of a commodity that made BC oil-rich for thousands of years.
The collapse of that oil economy is a lesson for Alberta and for the entire world.
It should be a lesson for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Natural Resources minister Joe Oliver and Environment minister Peter Kent, but it’s one that they will ignore.
The collapse of that oil economy is a lesson that should be taught ( but isn’t) by the departments of economics, business and politics at oil-patch academic central, the University of Calgary, which trained Stephen Harper and produces those self-satisfied commentators who can’t see anything beyond the Rockies and their own pet economic theories.
The collapse of the BC oil economy is proof that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” much loved of conservative economists is actually a deathly hallow in the hands of all those who are too greedy to care or who don’t bother to see what is actually in front of their blinkered eyes.
Much of the testimony at the Northern Gateway Joint Review hearings at the Haisla Recreation Centre on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, was about that economic collapse. Much of the testimony in Terrace, at the Sportsplex, on Thursday, January 12, 2012, was about that economic collapse.
The national and international media that came to cover that story didn’t realize what they were hearing. Only a couple of stories mentioned the ancient oil economy in BC but just in passing. It is probable that the members of the Joint Review Panel didn’t understand either, but it may be by the end of the hearings, once the panel has heard the story over and over, they may begin to realize how important it is.
(That is one reason that all the testimony before the Joint Review Panel is important. It’s the old story of hitting the donkey over the head with the two by four. The conservatives in the government, in the universities and the media who say repeat testimony isn’t needed are wrong. Sometimes a story has to be told numerous times before the powers that be realize, hey this is important. )
This isn’t about petroleum.
Nor is it about salmon oil or whale oil.
It’s about a small, some say ugly (compared to the magnificent sockeye salmon), member of the smelt family, a very distant relative of the salmon, the oolichan.
(There are several spellings. Euclachon is the usual academic spelling. One rare spelling is “hooligan.” That’s the one that spell checks and auto corrects prefer. Oolichan is the preferred spelling on the northwest coast, and thus that is what this article will use).
It was trade in oolichan oil and oolichan grease that sustained that economy in what is now British Columbia for thousands of years before the coming of Europeans.
Poster celebrating the oolichan released by artist Roy Henry Vickers
Trade in oolichan oil and oolichan grease created the “grease trails,” the trading routes leading from coastal British Columbia throughout the province and across the Rockies into Alberta.
Drive many of the highways in northern British Columbia and, like other parts of North America, where highways follow “Indian trails,” you are likely driving on a grease trail.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the grease trails, the trade in oolichan oil and grease may have begun as early as 5,000 years ago. By 2,000 years ago, the First Nations of British Columbia had a vibrant trading culture, with goods exchanged throughout the province, south to what is now the United States and north to Alaska.
Just as trade and industry in the Old World prompted the creation of infrastructure, the oolichan trade blazed trails and lead to technological developments such as suspension bridges and improved canoes.
The culture of BC First Nations has been disrupted for the past two centuries by smallpox and other diseases, creation of the reserves, by government and church paternalism, by the assimilation of the Indian Act, by residential schools and general acculturation. Despite those horrendous challenges, the oolichan-based trade has, left a multi-millenial legacy of expertise in trade negotiations. That is one factor in the current debate over the Northern Gateway pipeline. Ignorance of history is why the oil-patch and the Harper government have underestimated the First Nations in the current controversy.
Rich fish of the Pacific
The oolichan’s scientific name is Thaleichthys pacificus, “rich fish of the Pacific,” with oil making up to 15 per cent of its body content. That was the source of the rich oil economy.
Another name for the oolichan is “candle fish,” because often a dried oolichan was used as a candle by early European settlers.
The Gitxsan First Nation, now embroiled in a dispute after one chief signed a deal with Enbridge, traditionally called the oolichan the “fish for curing humanity.”
Oolichan grease/oil is rich in omega and other oils now in demand around the world. It is likely that the oolichan grease/oil countered the tendency to depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder caused by the rainy, overcast climate of coastal British Columbia, since omega oils are now recommended as anti-depressant.
Oolichan (James Crippen photo via Wikipedia Commons)
Properly managed, renewable in a way whale oil could never be, the oolichan could have been a multi-billion dollar industry, providing wealth to First Nations and export dollars for all of modern British Columbia.
It never happened.
When the Europeans arrived in British Columbia, they ignored the knowledge of the First Nations, ignored the oolichan. First the economic attraction was the sea otter, then it was the forests and the salmon, and then mining and hydro-electric developments. All the time the oolichan was out of sight and out of mind and becoming collateral damage of other industrial development.
The Kitimat River was one of the richest sources of that rich oolichan oil resource.
Samuel Robinson
Haisla Chief Samuel Robinson, who is 78, told the Joint Review Panel: “We used to fish… for oolichans which is now no more because of pollution in the river for the last 30 years. But the river is not dead yet. The salmon still go up there; that’s why we have to protect it. I know we can’t do much about the oohlicans now, but the salmon still go up there.
“Up the river, we spend our days there, harvesting oohlicans. In my childhood days, you didn’t need a net, you didn’t need hook, and you didn’t need anything. You can pick the oohlicans out of the water. In fact you could walk across to the other side. That’s how plentiful it was when we were thriving. [Now] No more oolichans.”
The oolichan stocks across northwestern North America have been declining for a century. No one, except First Nations knew or cared about this valuable, ugly little fish. Thirty years ago the pace of decline increased with the industrial development in the years following the Second World War. By the new millennium, the oolichan population was crashing from Oregon to north of Kitimat. The only viable stocks left are in the Nass and Skeena Rivers and those stocks are in trouble.
Endangered species
The oolichan in the Fraser River had completely collapsed by 2003. There was little, if any, media coverage. Compare that to the coverage of the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye run. Major headlines and now a Royal Commission investigating why.
In March, 2010, in California, Oregon and Washington, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service declared the oolichan to be a threatened species.
In January, 2011, I was tipped by three independent informed sources that the Canada’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada would soon declare the oolichan north from the US border up to the Skeena and the Nass as an endangered species. At a meeting of non-aboriginal recreational fishing guides that same month that there were also worries expressed that climate change might be affecting the remaining viable oolichan stocks in the Skeena and the Nass. There is no recreational, tourist oolichan harvest, by tradition it belongs to First Nations. The guides had no direct economic stake in the oolichan, but those guides knew very well from experience that the oolichan is a key indicator species in the collapse of all fish stocks in the rivers that they love and which sustain their business.
This crisis was out of sight, out mind with most of British Columbia and ignored by the rest of Canada.
I was unable to get any interest in this “scoop” from any of the national news organizations among my freelance clients. (One admittedly budget strapped editor told me “we’ve done fish from BC.”) Compare that with the ongoing coverage for decades of the cod crisis on Canada’s east coast.
The day the decision came out, in May, 2011 the oolichan was just one of the several species mentioned in the national news round up of new threats to the environment. Here is what COSEWIC news release said:
The Eulachon or ‘candlefish’, so-called because of its exceptionally high oil content and historical use as a candle, was assessed for the first time at this meeting. This small fish was once a cultural mainstay of many First Nations groups of coastal BC and the origin of the famous ‘grease trails’ that linked coastal and inland communities. Since the early 1990s, many traditional fisheries for this species have seen catastrophic declines of 90% or more, and the species is facing extirpation in many rivers. The cause is unclear but may be related to reductions in marine survival associated with shifting environmental conditions, by-catch, directed fishing and predation. Only the Nass River still supports a fishery but even here numbers have declined. The Nass / Skeena Rivers population of Eulachon was assessed as Threatened. Further south, the Central Pacific Coast and the Fraser River populations have experienced even greater declines resulting in an Endangered designation for both populations.
In the national media, only the Mark Hume of The Globe and Mail looked closely at the oolichan collapse, much later, in a story on May 28,. 2011 How to bring back the Eulachon?
In his testimony, on Jan. 10, 2012. Haisla Chief Counsellor, Ellis Ross said: “I was too young to go up the Kitimat River before the oolichan was wiped out. I missed out in that teaching.
“Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oolichans annually, these are the stories that are passed down to me now. It’s not about this is where you go to fish; this is where your fishing camp is. It’s about this is where it used to be. This is what we used to do… “
Haisla chief counsellor Ellis Ross testifies before the Joint Review Panel at Kitamaat Village, Jan. 10, 2012. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
Ross testified he has being going through the archives and records of the Haisla dealings with the federal and British Columbia governments. “All the assertion letters that council has sent out in the last 40 years in trying to determine what the Haisla Nation goal was. And it all had a common theme: protect the environment; bring back the environment. It always had that.”
He spoke of traditional knowledge and teaching. “Don’t disrupt the environment. Don’t spill any kerosene or gasoline into the river. Don’t litter in the river. Respect not only the oolichan and the river itself, respect your neighbours because once you are done with a fishing spot, you are going to process your oolichan and somebody else is going to move into that spot. So leave it the way you got it.
It’s a crime
“So as I was telling you, I missed out on all that, and it’s a crime. It’s an
absolute crime.
“The last story I got from the Kitimat River was my dad with Ray Green Sr. going up there after everybody else gave up on the Kitimat River. They tried to harvest oolichan so they could boil it into oolichan grease, but the end product smelled like effluent coming from the Eurocan Mill, so they thought it was just a product of the water itself. So they went inland a few hundred yards and dug a hole and tried to get the groundwater out of that and try to see if they could boil the oolichans using that. The result was the same.
“After that, there was no point because a run that estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually got reduced to maybe 50 individual oohlicans per year. And I know that because we’re trying to struggle every year to find oolichan so we can test them for taint. If that’s not a signal to Kitimat, if not B.C. and not to Canada, something’s wrong. I don’t know what that is.
“If that was a commercially viable product, the whole country would have been up in arms demanding some sort of report and accountability from DFO. Nothing. We got nothing. Nobody came to our aid.
Ross told of the story of how the Haisla first came to the Kitimat region, how other First Nations were afraid of a giant monster that guarded the channel. When the Haisla reached the Kitimat River estuary it turned out the “monster” was, in fact, so many gulls that they appeared as one huge body when they took to wing.
“I can’t imagine that,” Ross testified. “If there’s thousands upon thousands of seagulls doing that at a distance of maybe greater than seven miles viewing it, imagine how much oolichan was in the river that those seagulls are feeding on.”
“The personal experience I have with the Kitimat River in 2003-2004 was going down to Vancouver to meet with the Minister of Environment. So we were trying to save what was left of the Kitimat River, we were trying to save what was left of the oolichans.
“So the pulp and paper mill couldn’t reach its intended targets in terms of effluent dumping and emissions so what was the provincial government’s solution; let’s amend the permit, let’s make it larger so they can reach their targets. They didn’t say anything about making the company reach those targets, fulfil its obligations, they just said let’s make the permit bigger.
“Well, we told the provincial government ‘If that happens, if you do that against our wishes we’re going to court’. The Minister at the time had the gall to put it back to us and say, ‘Okay, the company has already said that if they’re forced to abide by these permit conditions they most likely will have to close down. How will Haisla feel when you guys are the ones to blame for this pulp mill shutting down, how will you explain that to your people that working inside Eurocan’.
“And we said, ‘Go ahead and do it, I’m pretty sure for the six people out of 500 working in Eurocan mill we can find other opportunities for them’. Six people, and you look at every industry in Haisla territory over the years it was always started by Haisla people but they were slowly squeezed out for one reason or another.
Promises of jobs
“It’s all based on promises that we’ll come in, we’ll give you employment, we won’t affect the environment, we’ll listen to your wishes. Basically saying whatever they could to get their project approved and then guess what, less than 10 years later we find out that it was all a lie; they just said what they could just to get that permit, their certificate, whatever it was.
“I was born in 1965 and by the time I was old enough to start joining the fishing party to go up the Kitimat River by 1975 it was starting to decline. It didn’t take long; it didn’t take long at all. Salmon weren’t far behind it. There’s a reason why that state-of-the-art hatchery was built right beside the Kitimat River not long after. There’s a reason for just about everything that happened to Haisla in the last 60 years and it’s all directly linked to industrial development.
“So instead of getting taught how to fish for oohlicans, how to process oohlicans, how to boil for oohlicans, how to collect the right wood for burning for the oolichan pot, how to skim the grease, how to bottle it, no, I’m taught how the government issued permits that took it all away.”
In 2010, West Fraser shut the Eurocan mill, killed 500 jobs in Kitimat and walked away, leaving their mess in Kitimat for the current and future generations, aboriginal and non-aboriginal alike to deal with. That is the deathly hallow of the invisible hand.
On January 12, 2012 , in Terrace, Chief Counsellor Don Roberts, of the Kitsumkalum First Nation appeared before the Joint Review Panel. In wide ranging testimony Roberts also spoke about the his First Nation’s concerns about the oolichan:
“The oolichans are from the Bering Sea, that’s where they come from. The food chain that they’re feeding up there is not researched. We’re not up there. But they feed something — they probably feed that same fish that’s migrating in here.
“The oolichan then come across the north end of Haida Gwaii and enter the coastal rivers.
“About six weeks ago, I heard on CBC they were talking with the elders
over Haida Gwaii. The pod of killer whales that never went south, they’re wondering
why. But a pod, about 40, with a bunch of pups, what they’re doing is feeding on that herring. They’re feeding on the oolichan.
He described about how after leaving Haida Gwaii. the oolichan come out of Grenville Channel and enter the Skeena River.
“This is where the oolichan hang out…This is a hundred fathom area, and they hang off [this] drop-off there, 100 fathoms, and they start moving in there in November and they just hang around there. They come from the Hecate Strait.
“Right now, we are in January. They’re still down in here yet. Probably if you go down there you’ll start seeing the life activity around there because the fish got to hold out there until the eggs are ripe and they start getting used to the [reduced] salinity in the water. Because way out in the ocean there, it’s almost 100 percent salinity…they’ll hold out here all of February, then move in.”
(The oolichan are in a zone where the fresh water from the rivers reduces the salinity of the ocean. This is where the oolichan adjust before moving inland, up river)
“In Grenville Channel, there is clam and cockle digging is from mid-October to March. The clams and cockles food harvest is always eaten with oolichan grease.
“Again, we are showing the importance of oolichan. It’s used as a main part of our culture. It’s used in everything…we eat it with salmon berries, now we’re eating it with the seaweed back then and the clams; every dish.
Food chain
At the mouth of the Skeena, “all the Chinook salmon are all in there but they all migrate in there. Everything that hits the Skeena all comes in here. All these tributaries all feed in salmon. The oolichans come in these deep channels and they start feeding into the Skeena. All the cods and all the halibut, everything comes in there, everything.
“When the oohlicans come in you can go down there and the halibut are there. And if you go there they’re [the oolichan] not there, you’ve got to dig really hard to get a halibut this time of the year. And after the oohlicans make their run in then you go out there again and they’re there.
“There’s the the sea prunes. I don’t know what Canada calls it, but that’s what we call it. They grow all along form Chatham Sound to Hecate Strait. It’s a delicacy. You pick it, you steam it, you peel that black off, the cells, the spine, and you dip it in oolichan grease and soya sauce, and you’ve got a dish.”
Roberts showed a map to the Joint Review Panel. “This is the map that the government showed us where the pipeline is going to run — the steamships are going to run, Enbridge. Kitimat all the way up there, come down, propose to go down here or propose to go out here. But all this area I’ve been talking about, there’s a — there’s the Skeena River right there. They [the oil tankers] just run right by it.
“All the halibut grounds are out here, right around all out there, you’re running right over it. All the seaweed grounds are all right there, all the way down here for the other Bands. All the way down. Abalone, the sea cucumbers, and the oolichan come right through there, the head of the food chain.”
That is the danger that First Nations and others fear, the destruction of the northwestern food chain.
New poster
This weekend, the distinguished aboriginal artist, Roy Henry Vickers, originally from Kitkatla, near Hazelton, now based in Campbell River, a member of the Order of Canada and Order of British Columbia, recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee medal, whose work has been Canada’s gift to world leaders including Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, and can be seen at Vancouver International Airport, publicly issued a poster, free for reproduction: “Oolichan Oil, not Alberta Oil.”
Since the declaration that the oolichan are an endangered species, those of aware of the issue in British Columbia have waited to see if the government of Stephen Harper will do anything, anything at all, to restore the oolichan stocks. After all, oolichan sustained the oil economy of British Columbia for at least two millenia, probably more.
Harper has not only done absolutely nothing about the oolichan, his government is ordering even more drastic cuts to the staff and resources of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans along the British Columbia coast. (The BC government also has some responsibilities for the oolichan as well since they divide their time between the ocean, which is federal, and the rivers which, except for the salmon, are provincial jurisdiction. The BC Liberals haven’t done anything either.)
The reason there is no trust for the Harper government in northwestern British Columbia, even among many northwestern conservatives, is that northwestern British Columbia is ignored not only on the oolichan issue, but on halibut allocation, the export of raw logs, the possible danger of farmed Atlantic salmon in southern British Columbia to the wild stocks in the north, the cutbacks at DFO and the Coast Guard. It appears to many here that Stephen Harper is perfectly prepared to sacrifice northwestern British Columbia for the sole benefit of Alberta and the bitumen sands.
The decline of the forest industry, while on one hand devastating, at least for now, for the economy of British Columbia, is slowly beginning to restore some of the rivers to health.
Imagine if the rivers were fully restored, and the oolichan came back to the sustainable, harvestable, economic levels that drove the BC economy for up to 5,000 years.
Along with salmon, herring and halibut, an oolichan harvest would provide all of British Columbia, First Nations and the rest of the province, with many hundreds more on-going jobs than the miniscule handful of permanent jobs this province will get along the Northern Gateway Pipeline route. It’s an ideal hope, of course, but an oolichan harvest would provide jobs and support the economy without the dangers of a major pipeline breach killing the river or an inevitable tanker accident, caused by human error (as all major shipping accidents are caused by human error) destroying the coast.
It appears that the Harper government is absolutely determined to put all of the Canadian economy in to one oily basket, the bitumen sands, and is refusing to consider any alternatives, especially any sustainable alternatives with the “green” label.
The great distances in northwestern BC mean people have to drive. The world economy will be dependent on petroleum for the time being and efforts to find viable, economic alternatives are mostly half hearted and sometimes even blocked for ideological reasons.
So, one has to be pessimistic. Stephen Harper, Joe Oliver and Peter Kent have made it crystal clear that the Northern Gateway pipeline will go ahead, no matter what and likely no matter what the Joint Review Panel says. So far in the hearings not a day has gone by without at least one witness telling the panel they believe the hearings are rigged in favour of Enbridge and the Conservative government.
The lesson for Alberta and Stephen Harper from the collapse of BC’s rich oolichan oil economy is that short sighted, blinkered thinking will lead inevitably to disaster. One has to wonder if Alberta cares whether there will be any petroleum left seven generations or seventy generations from now for all the non-burning uses such as petrochemicals and plastics.
Unfortunately, in sacrifice to the petro-economy and the deathly hallows of the invisible hand, the oolichan may actually go extinct, rather than creating a new, viable, oil-based economy for British Columbia.
Sources
Drake, Allen and Lyle Wilson, Eulachon A fish to cure humanity Vancouver, Museum Note No. 32, UBC Museum of Anthropology
Henley, Thom River of Mist, Journey of Dreams Rediscovery International Foundation, 2009
How could one of the most modern cruise ships in the world, the Italian liner Costa Concordia, presumably with GPS, satellite navigation, modern charts both on paper and computers, triple redundant aircraft type “bridge navigation systems,” depth sounders and hopefully look outs, hit rocks near the island of Giglio off Italy in calm seas on a calm night in the Mediterranean?
Maritime authorities, passengers and mounting evidence pointed Sunday toward the captain of a cruise liner that ran aground and capsized off the Tuscan coast, amid accusations that he abandoned ship before everyone was safely evacuated and was showing off when he steered the vessel far too close to shore.
Front page of the UK's Indpendent on Sunday Jan. 15, 2012
(Media reports are different. Some say rock, since there is clearly a huge rock lodged in the ship’s upturned hull seen in news photos and media video, or a reef or a sandbar)
It’s a question being asked around the world at the moment, as the rescue operation continues at this writing. It’s a question being asked up and down the coast of British Columbia, not only because similar cruise ships ply the Inside Passage but because of the debate over the possibility of bitumen-carrying supertankers on the coast.
There’s another question you’re already hearing on when the television networks interview experienced mariners and naval architects. The Mediterranean off the west coast of Italy isn’t exactly uncharted waters, that region has been sailed for “thousands of years.”
The headline in Sunday’s UK Independent, “We hit a rock, it shouldn’t have been there,” brings to mind Odysseus. When Odysseus left the bed of Circe, the seer, one of the things she warned him to beware of were the “wandering rocks.” Most scholars believe that the wandering rocks were far to the south of the accident scene. The British sailor Ernle Bradford, who sailed what he thought to be the route of Odysseus in the early 1960s, and published his story in Ulysses Found, believed the Wandering Rocks were in the Straits of Messina, and might have referred to eruptions from the volcano Stromboli.
The cause of the accident is under investigation by the Italian police, who are holding the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, for questioning. The sinking will also be investigated by Italian and presumably other maritime authorities (since there were many nationalities, including Canadians, on board).
It is highly unlikely that there were “wandering rocks” in the path of the Costa Concordia. That’s not the point, the point is that Odyssey reflects the fact the mariners from Mycenean Greece and even earlier the Minoans and Phoenicians were sailing the waters where the Costa Concordia grounded by at least 1250 BCE, the usually accepted date of the Trojan War. Local mariners and fishers probably sailed that area for a couple of thousand years before the first traders ventured into the Mediterranean. If we take 1250 BCE as a starting date for trading ships in that region, that is 3,262 years ago.
The island of Sardinia, not far from the sinking site was, according to scholars, (including the distinguished Robin Lane Fox in Travelling Heroes Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer), the cross roads of the Mediterranean from about 1100 BCE to about 700 BCE. That’s because with the limited capacity of the shore hugging galleys and freighters of the era, Sardinia was a perfect meeting and trading point for the Celts to the north, the Iberians to the West, the Etruscans and others in Italy, the Carthaginians and west African people to the south and the great traders of that age, the Greeks and the Phoenicians from the east.
Odysseus as portrayed on a Roman mosaic.
Simple conclusion, if we take the date from 1100 BCE, the sea around Giglio has been charted for 3,112 years. Those scholars of the sea believe that the warnings Circe gave Odysseus were adapted by Homer from real sailing instructions probably passed down as oral poems in age, between the collapse of Mycenean culture and the rise of classical Greece, when only a tiny handful of Phoenicians could read or write.
One has to wonder if the bridge crew of the Costa Concordia had just had a Roman chart, whether or not the cruise ship could have avoided the rocks/sandbar/reef.
So what went wrong and what does that mean for the controversial plan to have hundreds of both bitumen and LNG laden tankers going up and down the British Columbia coast?
Britain’s Daily Telegraph is already asking what went wrong, in Cruise disaster: Perfect storm of events caused Costa Concordia crash. The Telegraph is pointing out something critical to the plans by Enbridge for a highly computerized navigation system for Douglas Channel, the Inside Passage and the British Columbia coast: that many of today’s bridge officers don’t have the skills that Capt. George Vancouver would have demanded even from the youngest teenaged midshipman when he first charted the west coast for the Royal Navy.
The captain was reported to have said he hit a rock that was not marked on his charts. But that failed to explain adequately the scale of the disaster, which experts said should be unthinkable….
The Concordia, whose officers were all Italian, will also have operated Bridge Team Management, a system adopted from the aviation industry whereby each operation is double and triple-checked by several members of the crew….
Modern ships are required to carry voyage data recorders which store detailed information about the vessel’s speed, position, heading, radar and communications…
The first thing investigators will have to determine is whether the vessel should even have been where it was.
A source close to the investigation told a leading Italian newspaper that the boat was on the wrong course — possibly due to human error — and was sailing too close to Giglio.
The ship should have passed to the west of the island, rather than the east, according to this theory.
Yesterday fishermen on Giglio and in Porto Santo Stefano said it was very unusual for such a large ship to attempt a passage to the east of the island….
Douglas Ward, a cruise ship expert and author of Berlitz Ocean Cruising and Cruise Ships, said: “Crew don’t have as much training as in the past.
“Ships today are built with completely enclosed navigation bridges and the navigators don’t even have to learn how to use a sextant, whereas marine officers in the past always had to.
“The advance in hi-tech navigation systems is so good that we have come to rely on them. But even these can fail — look at car satnavs.”
So if the Enbridge Northern Gateway project is approved, and even if Enbridge implements all the navigation improvements it says it will, it all comes down to the competence of a bridge crew. Perhaps a GPS could tell them to turn to port instead of starboard (as GPS units in cars sometimes do) and there could be tanker hitting Gill Island, just where the Queen of the North sank, even if it is tied to an escort tug.
What makes the sinking of the Costa Concordia even more frightening is the negligence of Stephen Harper and his cabinet cronies who are gutting Canadian Coast Guard and DFO resources on both the West and East Coasts. It will be years before those super tankers might start coming up Douglas Channel. There was lots of rescue capability on the coast of Italy from the Italian coast guard and local boats. What about the giant cruise ships, a key aspect of the British Columbia economy? What if one of those ships got in trouble? The captain of the Costa Concordia was able to beach the ship right by the sea wall at the port of Giglio. On the rocky coast of BC, that giant cruise ship could go to the bottom in minutes just as the Queen of the North did, with little or no immediate hope of rescue.
A detail of a map from Ernle Bradford's Ulysses Found, published in 1964, retracing the voyage of Odysseus. Homer's epic is probably a record of a voyage around 1250 BCE. The point where the Costa Concordia sank has been added.
Members of the Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel, chiefs of the Haisla Nation and spectators watch the welcoming ceremony before the start of hearings at Kitamaat Village, Jan. 10, 2012. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
Chiefs of the Haisla Nation were the first witnesses to appear before the Northern Gateway Joint Review panel when the “community hearings” began in Kitamaat Village on Jan. 10, 2012.
The seven, Chief Counsellor Ellis Ross, Jassee chief Samuel Robinson, chiefs Rod Bolton, Ken Hall, Clifford Smith, Marilyn Furlan and Henry Amos spoke eloquently of Haisla traditional knowledge of the region, problems in the past with environmental degradation from local industry and their fears for a future if Northern Gateway pipeline proposed by Enbridge Inc. is approved.
After a welcome ceremony by the Spirit of Kitlope drummers and dancers, the first witness was Samuel Robinson, the Jassee chief of the Haisla Nation and a world renowned carver in wood, silver and gold. Robinson was the first of many First Nations leaders, first the Haisla at the Kitamaat Village hearings and later on Jan. 12 in Terrace the Kitsumkalum to speak of the collapse of the oolichan fishery.
“We have always been taught to take only what we need and to leave the harvest site in the same or better manner, condition, which — when we leave the area. This is a global concern to keep everything clean now,” Robinson said.
Henry Amos voiced his distrust for the government and the Joint Review process. “This is my own personal opinion that we are, the Haisla are already at a disadvantage…. I also know that you’re an independent body, which is good in a way, but what bothers me the most is that you’re appointed, I think from your information it was from the Minister of Environment and the National Energy Board. You’re appointed by the Federal Government and it’s the same government that is telling the world that this project should go ahead. That is my biggest concern right now, is that we are in a disadvantage.”
Chief Counsellor Ellis Ross spoke about the problems with cleaning up a relatively minor diesel spill in Kitimat harbour, “I was working for a charter boat company out of Kitimat, District of Kitimat. And a tugboat down at our dock here sunk, dumping all its diesel into the water…
“Optimal conditions; the water’s calm, you’re working off the dock, you got every gear that you can think of, you can pack it down. We still couldn’t pick that diesel up. In fact, most of it got under the dock and it took a year for it to all leech out, but we spent a couple days down there trying to do what we could, basically mopping it up.
“When we were done with the absorbent pads and booms, the first thing we found out is that, actually, nobody wanted to deal with that product. Our company had an agreement with the pulp and paper mill to burn the product in their furnace, natural gas furnace, so the higher-ups agreed to it, but when we got to the door, their workers refused us. So we were stuck outside the pulp and paper mill with these bags and bags of booms and absorbent pads.
“So they came down with a condition. You guys can burn it in our furnace, but you guys have got to pack it up there yourselves.
“So covered in diesel, soaking wet, stink, and nobody wanted to come near us, we had to do it ourselves. Nobody would touch that.”
Read the Haisla testimony in their own words. Here are links to the unfiltered voices of the chiefs from the transcripts of their testimony:
This story presents the unfiltered voices of Haisla chiefs when they testified at the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review hearings on January 10, 2011, at Kitamaat Village, based on the official transcript. There have been minor edits for clarity.
My name is Chief Jassee. My English name is Samuel Robinson. I’m from Beaver Clan;
Samuel Robinson
hereditary Chief of the Haisla Nation. I was born here in Kitamaat Village but spent a lot of my childhood days with my father trapping in Wewanee.
The area is rich with all kinds of food; halibut, cod, mussels and all kinds of seafood. There are a lot of fur-bearing animals. This is why I’m really concerned if this is damaged. In Wewa, we have a hot spring there. The first tub was made by my dad and my uncle George, made out of wood. If there’s any kind of spill that will be damaged.
There is a lot of seafood there. There is still a lot of seafood, I know because I’m owner/operator of a fishing charter business for the last 45 years. There are still a lot of fishing charter boats that depend on fishing in the Douglas Channel. I also watch the commercial fishermen. I know every inch of our territory because I’m out there almost every day in the summertime running my business.
I’ll get back to the head of the Kitimat River; this is where my concern starts.
We used to fish the number one reserve for a fish called eulachons, which is now no more because of pollution in the river for the last 30 years. But the river is not dead yet. The salmon still go up there; that’s why we have to protect it. I know we can’t do much about the eulachons now, but the salmon still go up there.
This is our last resort. Thank you for listening to me.
Up the river, we spend our days there, harvesting eulachons. In my childhood days, you didn’t need a net, you didn’t need hook, and you didn’t need anything. You can pick the eulachons out of the water. In fact you could walk across to the other side. That’s how plentiful it was when we were thriving. No more eulachons.
From the eulachon camp, we follow the river down to Kacla’isaa in my language Kacla is, English, “foot of the river.” There on the left-hand side, you’ll see a rock, a figure of a human being. We call it in my language, kwalach; that means sissy. It was used to teach young children, teenagers, not to run away from enemy but to stand up or else you’ll turn into a rock.
That’s what it is used for, to teach our children. This is what I’m concerned about, if it’s covered up with something. You travel down the same river, foot of the river, about a few lengths down you come to another carving, carving on rocks we call handumatsa in my language. It means bow and arrow, hatweegit. That protects the river; that’s what it’s there for.
And you travel down into the sea you come to my village, and at the point called Raley Point, right outside the south end of Kitamaat Village, there is another carving right down the beach, the figure is of a killer whale. You walk along the beach further to a creek called Wart, another carving is there and it’s carved, the figure is a human face. These are all signals that we were here for a long time.
If you look across the bay, right across the Bish Creek there’s another historic site there. We call it Huntclic in my language. It means targeting area. When the raiders come to raid my village they target in this rock. And the old people used to tell me the story — this is just within 100 years. The shafts of the arrows were sticking out. When the white man came here, they heard of it and went to check it and they found the remains of the arrowheads.
You travel down a little ways more and there’s a rock sticking out, the name of it is Kabat Regat. It’s a historical site too that teaches the young kids about sex and all that, what you’ll turn into if you misuse it. Adultery was a no -no in my village and that’s what this was for, to teach the young kids.
You travel down furthermore, you come to a place called Gilttoyees, a long inlet, and on the south mouth of the river — of the inlet you’ll see paintings, paintings of Indian paint telling who owns that area, who was there. And I’m one of the last ones that can read the signs and it makes me — tears come out of my eyes.
You follow the channel; you come to a place called Foch Lagoon. There was a village there — still there, a historic site too that will be affected by whatever damage. These were half human beings and half animals. It’s recorded in our history. We call it Fochfu in my language.
So these are all the places that I’m really worried about.
And you go further down the channel, we go into the Hartley Bay area, there are big boulders there carved in stone. It’s still there. Now I will tell you what the reason is, why these are carved in a tidal water. Most of it is below low water.
The Chief hired helpers to carve these rocks at low tide so when the raiders come in they will be the first one to spot the raiders and warn the Chief to get away. They were also helpers that carved mid-tide; these were done to warn the Chief, early warning, when the raiders come.
These are all the places that I’m worried about. It’s our history and it’s how we teach our children and our teenagers up till today.
And you go up to the Kitlope, at Kemano Village, at the south end of the village there’s another carving, a carving of a human being, a human face, That’s to protect that village from raiders. You go up to Kitlope, at the mouth of the river you’ll see all kinds of paintings telling who owns that place — we own it.
So these are all the things that I’m worried about. If it’s covered up with oil how are we going to protect ourselves? This is my concern.
And getting back to the sisur rock in the mouth of the water. If we — are we going to protect ourselves or are we all going to turn into stone? I don’t know. I’m happy — I’m hoping that doesn’t happen.
So all my area where I trap, where I trap — my dad’s favourite trap, I own it now. There are an abundance of fish there. There’s halibut, all kind of seafood, all kind of birds, all kind of fur animals.
This is what I’m concerned about, because my people, my family and everybody survived on all these animals. Please help us and hear us so we can continue to live the way we are. We are who we are.
I am the 11th Haimus, hereditary Chief of Kitimaat Village. My name is Jassee. I was born into the bloodline; that is why I’m a chief. I did not choose to be a chief. All our lives my brother and I were trained in the role of responsibility as a leader of the Beaver Clan and the Haisla Nation. It just didn’t happen overnight.
I started my training from my grandmother and mother when I was only
12 years old. I know all the history, laws, ins and out of the Native culture. Probably
I’m the last one. So there, hear me, please.
The transfer of my name was done according to custom tradition of our ancestors. The oldest son of the mother is first in line for the title. When he dies the next oldest brother takes over, the son to be, same bloodline clan as the mother.
My brother Tom — the late Tom Robinson, my brother — held this name before me for 50 years. So if you add all the chiefs together it comes to a lot of numbers.
Our nation is subdivided by a clan system according to your mother’s line. The Beaver Clan, the Raven work together. The Eagle Clan, Fish, Salmon, and Killer Whale, each clan is headed by the chief who acts as their leader and all the directions of Jassee of the Beaver Clan. The major benefit of this system keeps history, maintains law, protects family, divides responsibility and education.
During a trauma, a celebration, a major undertaking all clan members provide comfort and support. We know ourselves, Haisla, which means “People Living at the Foot of the River at the South End.” Haisla means “south.” You know we’re in the north but to the Nass Valley people we’re the south people; that’s why we’re called Haisla.
Later the Tshimshian called us Kitamaat, which means “People of the Snow.” We speak part Kwakuit language. Group of why we understand people from clan too, Bellabella, Alert Bay, Macaw from the United States. Our territory is located approximately centre of the north and south border of the west coast of B.C. We are surrounded by other First Nations.
Our territory includes the land and waters surrounding all of Kitimat River, the Douglas Channel up to including Gardner Canal. We know all these places by Haisla name and by the use of their resources.
In the past, during the mid-winter, our people move over gathering and providing food, making tools, building canoes, drying salmon, digging for clams and cockles, collecting roots, berries, plants, medicine; for many other reasons.
We live here in Kitamaat Village which was used as a winter settlement because of the location from extreme weather conditions. My mother, late mother, Laura, was asked how long we have lived here. She motioned with her thumb and her index finger almost together and said: “Since the trees were this small.” That’s my mother.
Judging from the growth of the spruce tree located near the Kitimat River Oolikan camp Housing Site, we have been here for 1,500 to 2,000 years according to the growth of the tree. Our people have travelled various of locations to harvest food, material, trading with other communities up and down the Coast by dugout canoe.
We also travelled by land through the B.C. interior. For example, our people in Kimaloo area travelled over the mountain to trade our eulachon grease with people living in the B.C. interior. Some married there and some of us still have relations living there.
We know our ancestors travelled up and down the West Coast of what is called now “the United States”. Because of our isolat ion, we had to be self-sufficient, depending our ability to utilize our territory resources: the forest for its plants and animals; the river for its varieties of food, seafood, shell fish and other seafood.
Our main source is the salmon which we preserve by the hundreds for each family for immediate use and winter use. It worries me to think all of these will be lost and destroyed when there is a spill. Mark my word, when there is a spill. Experience shows it will happen.
We have always been taught to take only what we need and to leave the harvest site in the same or better manner, condition, which — when we leave the area. This is a global concern to keep everything clean now.
We always have been a peaceful nation but when it isn’t through discussion and negotiation, when all fails, we went to war to protect our family, our rights, our ownership of food, shelter and safety.
When they made our reservations, our Chiefs had very little education; in fact, couldn’t write or read. But we had one stand-out Chief named Sunre. His name was Johnny Bolton. On September 1st, 1913, the Royal Commission interviewed Kitamaat Indian Chief Sunre. Chief Johnny Bolton made the following statement — Chief Johnny Bolton, this is his words:
“We are troubled about our land. It is not straight to us somehow. It is ours because we were born here, our forefathers before us. We want you to understand it. We want to know how Government got the land outside the Reserve. Chairman, we have not anything to do with land outside the Reserve, we have no authority to settle that question at all. It is no use bringing it before us.”
“We are troubled about how the Government has gone and sold our land outside our Reserve. We know it’s our land and not the Government’s and they have gone out and sold it and done what they like with it.”
For that, I don’t want that to happen again. We want to say — we want our say in this process that’s coming up, this pipeline. We will be not walked over again like the way they’ve done on the Reserve system. We want to have a voice and we’re going to have a voice.
A coalition of BC environmental groups have re-released a poll from last spring showing that almost 75 per cent of British Columbians are worried about foreign investment in Canadian natural resources. The poll also shows that only a small minority of British Columbians (15%) are concerned about charitable funding provided by US philanthropic foundations to Canadian environmental groups.
The poll was conducted by Strategic Communications in April 2011 and commissioned by the following groups: BC Sustainable Energy Association; Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society – BC Chapter; Conservation Northwest; Dogwood Initiative; Ecojustice; ForestEthics; Georgia Strait Alliance; Greenpeace; Pembina Institute; Sierra Club BC; West Coast Environmental Law; Wildsight.
Based on a random online sample of 830 adult British Columbians, the results are considered accurate to within plus or minus 3.4 percent 19 times out of 20.
This poll shows that 47.1% of respondents were very worried and 32.1% somewhat worried about “Americans controlling our natural resources.” Asking if people were worried about China, 39.0 % were very worried and 33.8% were somewhat worried about “China investing in our natural resources.” It shows that 38.3% were “very worried” and 34.2% “somewhat worried” about “China taking or controlling our natural resources.”
The news release from the groups says
“These poll results suggest that the oil lobby’s attacks against environmental groups are out of touch with the true values of British Columbians. The real issue is the unacceptable risk of a foreign-funded pipeline-oil tanker project that would ram pipe through unceded First Nations lands to ship some of the world’s dirtiest oil across thousands of fragile salmon-bearing rivers and streams,” said Will Horter, Executive Director of the Dogwood Initiative. “225 Supertankers a year, many larger than the Exxon Valdez, would need to transit the treacherous fjords of the Great Bear Rainforest, on route to China. This pipeline is all risk and no reward for British Columbians.”
According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), over the three-year period from 2007-2010 alone, foreign companies poured nearly $20 billion dollars into the tar sands. In contrast, according to blogger Vivian Krause, US charitable foundations have given Canadian environmental groups less than 1.5% of that amount over a ten year period, accounting for all charitable funding on Canadian environmental issues ranging from forest protection to fisheries conservation.
“Funding for environmental charities helps to right the imbalance between ordinary citizens and the financial and political influence of multinational companies in Canada,” said Jessica Clogg of West Coast Environmental Law. “Since 1974, our environmental legal aid services have enabled citizens and community groups throughout BC to participate in resource decisions – like the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline – that would profoundly affect their lives.”
“Canadians value the importance of environmental advocates speaking up for economic development that sustains our communities without destroying the ecology that supports us,” said Sierra Club BC Executive Director George Heyman. “We represent a legitimate Canadian viewpoint that is critical to sound policy-making, particularly when facing the influential, China-backed Enbridge pipeline lobby.”
As with many polls in a polarized situation, there are problems. As Northwest Coast Energy News showed last week, the numbers in the Enbridge-sponsored poll are unreliable for northern British Columbia. The environmental groups’ poll could also be considered suspect by the way the questions were phrased and the order in which they were asked.
The Joint Review Panel hearings on the Northern Gateway pipeline are less than 48 hours from now. The media are packing their bags and coming to Kitimat (or perhaps Terrace since this town is booked solid).
The propaganda war, and it can only be called a propaganda war, is in full force, driven mostly by right wing columnist Ezra Levant and his Ethical Oil organization, objecting to “foreign intervenors in the pipeline hearings at another site OurDecision.ca
This now seems to have widespread support, in a Twitter debate last night, many even moderate conservatives and even moderate Albertans were saying there is too much foreign influence in the JRP hearings.
I have one question for these people. Where were you in June? On a beach?
It was in June that the National Energy Board held hearings on the first of the three proposed Liquified Natural Gas projects in Kitimat. No media hordes descended on Kitimat. At those hearings only local reporters showed up and I was the only one that stuck through the entire proceedings. (The NEB did approve the export application)
So when the media quote Levant and his spokesperson Kathryn Marshall, the widespread stories about this malevolent foreign influence are inaccurate because they weren’t in Kitimat in June so they didn’t hear all those deep Texas drawls in the hearing room at the Riverlodge Recreation Centre.
Although a lot of good reporters are coming into town this week, they’ll all be gone by Thursday morning when the JRP hearings move on to Terrace.
Who should decide whether Canada should build an oil pipeline to our west coast — Canadian citizens or foreign interests?
That’s what the fight over the Northern Gateway pipeline is about. Sure, it’s also about $20 billion a year for the Canadian economy and thousands of jobs. It’s about opening up export markets in Asia. It’s about enough new tax dollars to pay for countless hospitals and schools.
But it’s really about Canadian sovereignty. Do we get to make our own national decisions, or will we let foreign interests interfere?
The answer should be obvious to any self-respecting Canadian: This is a Canadian matter, and Canadians should decide it.
Why weren’t Levant and the rest of the blue-eyed sheikh crowd (OK they don’t all have blue yes but you know what I mean) across the Rockies here in June objecting to those Americans interfering in Canadian affairs with their plans to export liquefied natural gas to Asia?
Who is behind the Kitimat LNG project? Well, the KMLNG partners are Houston, Texas based Apache Corporation, Houston, Texas based EOG Resources and Encana, a company that originated in Canada but now has extensive operations in the United States and around the world.
The second LNG project, which is now before the National Energy Board, is BC LNG, a partnership between a Houston, Texas-based energy company and the Haisla First Nation here in Kitimat.
The third LNG project is coming from energy giant Royal Dutch Shell.
When are we going to see Ethical Oil and all those conservative columnists objecting to American participation when the NEB holds hearings on the second and third LNG projects?
This goes all the way to the centre of power. Stephen Harper objects to the Northern Gateway hearings being “hijacked by foreign money.” I notice the Prime Minister didn’t object to the hearings in June with American companies Apache and EOG investing in a natural gas pipeline. Cabinet ministers Joe Oliver and Peter Kent are also concerned about foreign influence on pipeline projects. That is they are only worried about possible foreign influence when it comes to the environment. Foreign influences that are building natural gas pipelines and LNG terminal facilities are perfectly fine, thank you.
Blaming “foreign influence”, of course, is one of the oldest dirty tricks in the political playbook. In recent days Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has blamed foreign influence for the demonstrations against the rigged election in that country. In Syria, Bashir al-Assad is still blaming “foreign agitators” for the revolt against his regime. Before they were ousted, both Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Mohamar Gaddafi of Libya blamed “foreign agitators” for the Arab Spring. Go to Google News and type in “foreign influence” or “foreign agitators” and now that Google News also searches news archives, you can find stories of politicians all over the world blaming foreigners for their troubles going back to the turn of the last century.
It’s just sad to see Canada’s leading politicians and the major media joining that sorry tradition.
Note Natural Gas is not bitumen
Some in the media seems to be puzzled that most of the people in northern British Columbia are not objecting to the liquified natural gas projects. The media seem puzzled that KM LNG has been able to reach agreements with First Nations along the natural gas pipeline routes when Enbridge can’t.
(One factor is that Enbridge got off on the wrong foot with First Nations and things have generally gone downhill from there, leading people in northwest BC to question the general competence of Enbridge management.)
The answer is that natural gas is not bitumen. Natural gas is known factor. Bitumen, despite the thousands of pages of documents field by Enbridge with the JRP, is an unknown factor since there has never been a major bitumen disaster.
The worst case scenario, a catastrophic LNG ship explosion, could cause a huge forest fire. A natural gas pipeline breach under the right conditions could start a big forest fire. The environment of northwestern British Columbia has evolved to deal with fires. After such an incident, nature would take over and the forest would eventually come back. It is likely that the forest would take longer to recover than it would from a lightning strike fire, but the forest would recover. Bitumen leaking into salmon spawning rivers would kill the rivers. Bitumen stuck at the deep and rocky bottom of Douglas Channel would contaminate the region, probably for centuries.
