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At the TMX Pipeline Hearing, the Sham of ‘Consultation’ Laid Bare
At the TMX Pipeline Hearing, the Sham of ‘Consultation’ Laid Bare
Canada ‘barged ahead’ with what ‘cannot be in the public interest,’ argue First Nations.
Those nations oppose the approval of TMX, as do several others, including the Coldwater Indian Band, located inland just south of the town of Merritt. The Coldwater’s opposition stems from a threat to an aquifer which is the main source of its members’ drinking water. (The band’s complaints were documented extensively by The Tyee in October.)
In Courtroom 601 of Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal in downtown Vancouver this week, three judges presided over a judicial review of the decision by the Trudeau government in June to approve the pipeline.
Before them were 27 black-robed lawyers (and a few more in civilian clothing) who outnumbered the peasantry in the packed courtroom (an overflow crowd watched a patchy video stream in a room two floors above).
The lawyers lined up on either side of a chasm that continues to exist between a national government that is impossibly conflicted by its position as both owner and regulator of the pipeline, and Indigenous peoples for whom that same government has fiduciary and constitutional obligations.
It is a chasm made wider by the fact that many First Nations simply don’t agree with Canada’s interpretation of what constitutes the “national interest” — TMX being Exhibit A.
Put simply, Canada chose in June to give regulatory approvals to a project it owns, having satisfied itself that its consultation with First Nations was good enough — even though several of them claim the government flat out ignored their issues, again, and even tampered with peer-reviewed science that supported their concerns about the environmental risks posed by TMX.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why Trudeau’s Trans Mountain Dreams May Trickle Out in Coldwater
Why Trudeau’s Trans Mountain Dreams May Trickle Out in Coldwater
IN DEPTH: A tiny Indigenous band’s epic pipeline fight takes its biggest turn.
On the Friday evening of June 7, Chief Lee Spahan of the Coldwater Indian Band received an email from Mitchell Taylor, Q.C., head of a federal consultation team acting under the auspices of Canada’s Department of Justice.
The email contained an offer, and an assertion.
The offer was that the government would take a new approach to deciding where the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX) pipeline would be routed in relation to the Coldwater reserve, whose people are determined to protect the freshwater aquifer upon which they depend.
That issue had remained wholly unresolved after four years of negotiations, court judgments in favour of the Coldwater’s position, countless hours of consultations, and many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on futile wrangling.
The stakes were high for the Coldwater, for the TMX, and for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had placed a heavy political bet on using taxpayer’s money to buy the pipeline and guaranteeing its expansion would happen. Last year, the Federal Court of Appeal threw out TMX’s permit to proceed, demanding more rounds of consultation with the Coldwater and other Indigenous nations in the path of the pipeline.
Now, with the new offer came this assertion: “Canada believes this commitment satisfies what we understand to be your key concerns.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Barry Lopez on Hope, Capitalism and Environmental Disaster
Barry Lopez on Hope, Capitalism and Environmental Disaster
‘The only thing you can’t do in public is to destroy people’s sense of hope.’
The Tyee: In Orion magazine, Rebecca Solnit once quoted the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder who said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.” She wrote that “in the bioregional 1970s, going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed… The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less… We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future.” Is she right? Was Gary Snyder right?
Barry Lopez: They are both right in a sense. It’s important to maintain an international awareness of global problems like methane gas releases and climate change. It’s hard as an American now that we’ve pulled out of the Paris accords not to be embarrassed abroad. But it’s important to get outside the bounds of your own nation state, to see what people are experiencing, and to report on what they are doing about it. If you are not in the Arctic, you simply cannot understand the staggering change that we are experiencing through climate change.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
