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‘Northern Gateway Will Never Happen’: Oil Spill Consultant
‘Northern Gateway Will Never Happen’: Oil Spill Consultant
Activists cheered Trudeau’s tanker ban Friday for ‘effectively stopping the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.’ Photo by Jackie Dives.
Trudeau-ordered ban on north coast oil tankers expected to kill Enbridge pipeline.
Conservationists are heralding the federal government’s decision to ban crude oil tanker traffic along British Columbia’s north coast as the death knell for the proposed Enbridge oil pipeline.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered instructions Friday to the ministers of transport, fisheries, natural resources and environment to formalize a moratorium that experts say will block the controversial Northern Gateway project from continuing.
A ban would prevent hundreds of tankers each year from carrying diluted bitumen extracted from Alberta’s oil sands and piped up to northern B.C. from being shipped for export overseas.
”It will mean that Northern Gateway will never happen,” said Gerald Graham, a Victoria consultant specializing in oil spills for more than 40 years.
He said it remains to be seen what oil and gas activities will be permitted and which communities could be affected.
”It’s one thing to say what can’t take place, but another to say what will be allowed.”
The moratorium makes official a non-binding motion the House of Commons passed in 2010. It would put the Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound off limits to tanker traffic in the government’s bid to protect ecologically sensitive areas.
The policy’s roots date back more than four decades to Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who worked with a British Columbia MP to pass an original ban involving the coastal waters north of Vancouver Island.
”I celebrated 44 years ago and I may be celebrating again. It’s basically an echo,” said David Anderson, who chaired the government’s environmental committee in 1972 and later became Liberal environment minister.
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‘Perfect Storm’ Engulfing Canada’s Economy Perfectly Predictable
‘Perfect Storm’ Engulfing Canada’s Economy Perfectly Predictable
Years ago Andrew Nikiforuk, citing experts, warned where Stephen Harper’s priorities would lead us.
Economists, an irrational tribe of short-sighted mathematicians, are now calling Canada’s declining economic fortunes “a perfect storm.”
It seems to be the only weather that complex market economies generate these days, or maybe such things are just another face of globalization.
In any case, economists now lament that low oil prices have upended the nation’s trade balance: “Canada has posted trade deficits every month this year, and the cumulative 2015 total of $13.6 billion is a record, exceeding the next highest, in 2009, of $2.95 billion.”
But this unique perfect storm gets darker. China, which Harperites eagerly embraced as the globe’s autocratic growthlocomotive, has run out of steam.
As the country’s notorious industrial revolution unwinds, China’s stock market has imploded. Communist party cadres are now moving their money to foreign housing markets in places like Vancouver.
Throughout the world, analysts no longer refer to bitumen as Canada’s destiny, but as a stranded asset. They view it as a poster child for over-spending, a symbol of climate chaos, a signature of peak oil and a textbook case of miserable energy returns. Nearly $60-billion worth of projects representing 1.6 million barrels of production were mothballed over the last year.
A new analysis by oil consultancy Wood Mackenzie reveals that capital flows into the oilsands could drop by two-thirds in the next few years.
The Bank of Canada doesn’t describe the downturn led by oil’s collapse as a recession because the “R word” smacks of negative thinking or just plain reality.
Surely lower interest rates will magically soften the consequences of a decade of bad resource policy decisions, Ottawa’s elites now reason.
Meanwhile the loonie, another volatile petro-currency, has predictably dropped to its lowest value in six years along with the price of oil.
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Is ‘holding the course’ putting Canada in recession?
Conservatives blame ‘external factors’ for slide, economists say government choosing to let it go
Emanuella Enenajor likely caused more than a few politicians to choke on their Stampede pancakes last week.
The analyst with Bank of America Merrill Lynch was the first from a major financial institution to utter the dreaded R-word — recession.
Two consecutive quarters of decline are what the textbooks define as a recession.
Stuck in a ‘funk’
Statistics Canada has already told us GDP shrank by 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, and slid a further 0.1 per cent in April.
Enenajor has seen nothing to indicate May or June — the last two months of the second quarter — were any different.
“We’re stuck in a bit of a funk,” she said in an interview with CBC’s The House.
The oil shock has taken its toll on jobs, unemployment, economic development and the like.
From beneath his black Stetson at the annual Calgary Stampede parade last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper kept his cool and even reckoned he’d seen worse.
“I’ve been in [Alberta] for 36 years now — I’ve seen a lot worse dips in the oil sector than this — and I am very confident the city and the province will bounce back quickly,” he told reporters.
While for obvious reasons the effects are felt most strongly in Alberta, they are being felt across the country.
Solid growth to come
Finance Minister Joe Oliver also appeared on The House this week, denying a recession has taken hold.
He said he believes there will be “solid growth for the full year,” in 2015, but concedes the first half will be rough.
“I think people understand the recent economic data is a result of external events,” Oliver said.
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As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him
As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him
Students, provinces, investors and unions are taking action. How long can he ignore it?
One of the first things Stephen Harper did after winning a majority in 2011 was to build a system of levees around the Prime Minister’s Office. They weren’t physical levees, of course, like the type designed to keep water from flooding New Orleans. Rather, they were ideological ones, erected on the belief that climate action is at odds with a healthy economy. Surrounded by those levees, Harper did whatever he wanted on climate change, which for the most part meant ignoring it completely.
His Conservative government passed laws to accelerate the growth of Canada’s oil and gas industry, while pledging carbon regulations that never came. He pulled Canada from the Kyoto Protocol, muzzled federal scientists and cut funding to their research, strong-armed the U.S. on bitumen pipelines and set climate targets he had no clear intention of meeting. But something unexpected happened. A frustrated cohort of students, provinces, investors and unions decided to take decisive climate action on its own.
Harper’s done his best to withstand this rising tide. He’s argued that climate is low on the list of “significant challenges,” for instance, after 400,000 people marched for action in New York; that regulating the emissions of polluters is “crazy,” as Ontario readied a system of cap-and-trade; that Canada is a fossil fuel “superpower,” as billions of investment dollars flowed into clean energy; and that taxing carbon is “job-killing,” as Canada’s largest private sector union argued the exact opposite.
Levees don’t break bit by bit. They collapse all at once — and with a destructive fury. The storm surge that breached New Orleans’ defences in 2005 killed 1,800 people. The surge of anti-Tory opinion in Alberta’s recent election swept away a 44-year-old political dynasty. For four years Harper has been governing on climate change, as well as many other issues, from behind a system of ideological levees. As the federal election this fall nears, how long will Harper ignore the forces rising against him?
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