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A Danish Journalist Arrived to Cover the TMX Pipeline. The Guard at YVR Decided to Deport Him

August 23, 2020

A Danish Journalist Arrived to Cover the TMX Pipeline. The Guard at YVR Decided to Deport Him

Kristian Lindhardt says Canada’s laws stifle press freedom afforded ‘during every crisis.’

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Danish documentary-maker Kristian Lindhardt works with his country’s version of the CBC and has visited BC many times working on his documentary about the the Tsleil Waututh First Nation’s opposition to the TMX pipeline expansion. Photo: Supplied

When Danish journalist Kristian Lindhardt arrived at the Vancouver airport on Friday, he knew he would face additional levels of border scrutiny because of the coronavirus. Lindhardt wasn’t too concerned, though, because he has international press credentials from Denmark’s version of CBC and a statement from Chief Reuben George of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation explaining that Lindhardt is here to report on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Lindhardt had also made all the necessary arrangements for a 14-day quarantine in Vancouver.

But just as Lindhardt was about to get through customs a border guard pulled him aside. The guard questioned him for hours and made him sign a document promising to fly back to Denmark today. “I asked what happens if I don’t sign them,” Lindhardt told The Tyee over the phone Saturday morning, just hours before his flight back to Europe was set to depart. “And he said he would detain me in a jail cell.”

The B.C. government currently deems “newspapers, television, radio, call centres, online news outlets and other media services” as essential work. But there is no direction from the federal government saying journalists must be let into the country, according to Green Party MP and former leader of the party Elizabeth May, who has looked into the issue. At the end of the day, it’s up to individual border guards to decide who can enter and who can’t.

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Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Inches Forward, But Opposition Intensifies

August 21, 2020

Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Inches Forward, But Opposition Intensifies

Tiny House Warriors rally near Blue River, BC

Late one night this past April, four people on off-road vehicles drove into a small, Indigenous village near the town of Blue River in British Columbia, Canada. It was dark and the vehicles drove through deep snow, smashing through wooden signs and barriers that guarded the village of tiny houses, erected in the path of a long-distance oil pipeline that runs from Alberta to the Pacific Coast.

The attackers punched and kicked a man, shouting profanity and racial slurs. One of them stole a truck and used it to mow down a display of red dresses, hung as a memorial to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, who are disproportionally affected by violence. The driver then crashed the truck into one of the houses.

The small houses were built by Secwepemc and Ktunaxa people, who built them to assert their rights over unceded Indigenous land, through which an expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline is slated to carry diluted tar sands oil. Members of the village believe the attack was related to their opposition to the pipeline.

Confrontation between the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and a variety of Indigenous and environmental groups is heating up, precisely because the new pipeline is now moving forward with construction after years of legal battles.

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau purchased the Trans Mountain system from Kinder Morgan in 2018 in order to keep the expansion alive. Texas-based Kinder Morgan was about to scrap the project, but Canada bought it for C$4.5 billion and vowed to see a second, “twin,” pipeline built alongside the existing line. The expansion would triple the system’s capacity to 890,000 barrels of oil per day, allowing Alberta’s tar sands to expand to overseas markets.

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Trans Mountain Pipeline Spills up to 50,000 Gallons of Oil on Indigenous Land in BC

June 18, 2020

Trans Mountain Pipeline Spills up to 50,000 Gallons of Oil on Indigenous Land in BC

Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline spilled as many as 190,000 liters (approximately 50,193 gallons) of crude oil in Abbotsford, British Columbia (BC) Saturday, reinforcing concerns about the safety of the pipeline’s planned expansion.

Chief Dalton Silver of the Sumas First Nation told CTV News that the spill occurred on his reserve on fields over an aquifer that supplies his nation with drinking water. It marks the fourth time in 15 years that the pipeline has spilled on his community’s land.

“We cannot continue to have our land desecrated by oil spills,” he said in a statement issued by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) Sunday.

The spill occurred early Saturday morning at the pipeline’s Sumas Pump Station, Trans Mountain told CBC News. The company said no construction work related to the pipeline’s expansion was being done at the time of the spill.

Instead, the spill appeared to have been connected to a fitting on a smaller piece of pipe attached to the main line, the company said in a statement.

“The cause of the incident is under investigation and that will continue,” company spokesperson Ali Hounsell told CTV News. “At this time, it’s believed to be a failure of a small-diametre, one-inch piece of pipe.”

The company estimated that between 940 to 1,195 barrels (or 150,000 to 190,000 liters) of oil was released and fully contained.

“Clean-up is well underway with trucks and crews working around the clock,” the company said in a Sunday afternoon statement. “The free-standing oil has been recovered and is being transported to an approved facility for disposal. The site has permanent groundwater monitoring in place and air monitoring continues. Monitoring has not identified any risk to the public or community.”

The pipeline was initially shut off in response to the spill, but restarted around 2 p.m. local time Sunday.

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Why Trudeau’s Trans Mountain Dreams May Trickle Out in Coldwater

October 4, 2019

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.

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‘Nobody respects us,’ says Coldwater Chief Lee Spahan, his band having filed a new challenge to the TMX project he says has long trespassed his people’s territory. Photo by Mychaylo Prystupa.

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.”

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Trudeau’s Climate Change Policy Is Strategically Inadequate

June 21, 2019

Trudeau’s Climate Change Policy Is Strategically Inadequate

Approving a pipeline while declaring a climate emergency is ‘climate change denial with a human face.’

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
‘This is how climate change denial will increasingly look in the future.’ Photo by Mychaylo Prystupa.

The Trudeau government’s recent actions — declaring a climate emergency and re-approving the Trans Mountain expansion project within two days — aren’t just hypocritical: they’re morally equivalent to climate change denial.

The United Nation’s authority on climate change recently recommended“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to counter an imminent crisis, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent decisions have flagrantly ignored the UN’s counsel.

He’s bent over backwards to ensure the Trans Mountain pipeline’s expansion, propping up the project with extensive financial and rhetorical support. In the process, the Trudeau government has perpetuated the prerogatives of an industry that has funded climate change denying research and (knowingly) pollutes the planet. 

Make no mistake: Trudeau’s actions represent climate change denial “with a human face,” a darker version of Czech communist leader Alexander Dubček’s 1968 description of his ill-fated liberalization program as “socialism with a human face.” 

Trudeau and the Liberal party affirm the reality of global warming in theory, but they effectively deny the phenomenon in practice by facilitating a harmful status quo and belittling the urgency of radical change.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

This is how climate change denial will increasingly look in the future: a mixture of symbolic proclamation and strategically inadequate policy. 

With flooding, suffocating wildfires and abnormal temperatures across much of the country, the climate crisis isn’t just a theoretical concern for most Canadians. Global warming’s impacts are now apparent, a fact that’s reflected in a recent poll showing that over two-thirds of Canadians consider stopping climate change “a priority.” 

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Trudeau Declared a Climate Crisis, then Backed Trans Mountain Again

June 19, 2019

Trudeau Declared a Climate Crisis, then Backed Trans Mountain Again

Opponents slam approval of potentially ‘catastrophic’ pipeline expansion.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces the second approval of the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Ottawa with fellow cabinet ministers. ‘We listened to community concerns and we are acting on community ideas.’ Photo by Sean Kilpatrick, Canadian Press.

A day after declaring a “climate emergency,” the federal government approved for the second time the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline that it now owns. 

In announcing cabinet’s decision, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said fighting climate change and growing the economy are complementary.

“We need to create wealth today so we can invest in the future,” he said. “This project has the potential to create thousands of solid middle class jobs for Canadians.”

Opponents, including the B.C. government, slammed the decision and justification, saying the project puts the coast at risk, as well as tens of thousands of jobs that depend on a clean environment. 

The existing pipeline from Edmonton, Alberta to Burnaby, British Columbia has capacity to carry 300,000 barrels of oil and petroleum products a day. The $7.4-billion expansion project would triple that.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

The federal government approved the pipeline expansion in 2016, but a Federal Court of Appeal ruling overturned the approval, finding that the government failed to adequately consult First Nations and that the National Energy Board’s review of the project should have considered tanker traffic and the threat to southern resident killer whales.

A year ago, the federal government spent $4.5 billion to buy the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline and take over the expansion project from Texas company Kinder Morgan.

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This small branch of Trans Mountain could derail Canada’s pipeline purchase

August 24, 2018

This small branch of Trans Mountain could derail Canada’s pipeline purchase

The vast majority of oilsands crude moving to the West Coast passes through the little regarded Puget Sound Pipeline, which is now heavily entangled in troubled Canada-U.S. relations

Politicians and industry have long boasted of the ability for an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline to get oil to lucrative Asian markets from Burnaby’s Westridge terminal.

But experts in Washington State are increasingly concerned that the twinning of the Edmonton-to-Burnaby pipeline may in fact lead to an expansion of the Puget Sound Pipeline, a 111-kilometre “spur line” from Trans Mountain that branches southward at Abbotsford to carry oil to four large refineries in the Puget Sound region.

If Kinder Morgan shareholders vote to approve the deal, Canada will purchase the Puget Sound Pipeline as part of the $4.5 billion deal for the existing Trans Mountain line — meaning the decision to expand the spur line would eventually fall to Ottawa.

Trump may use Puget Sound Pipeline to punish Canada for trade conflict

According to a recent analysis from the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the presence of the Puget Sound Pipeline in the $4.5 billion sale to Canada may end up being the very thing that scuttles the deal.

That’s because the U.S. government is required to approve the purchase as it crosses the border, including review by both the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and State Department.

President Donald Trump would ultimately decide the verdict of the deal — which he may oppose given his erratic approach to addressing ever-growing trade tensions between the two countries.

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Canada Bets On Trans Mountain Expansion To Sell Oil In Asia

June 11, 2018

Canada Bets On Trans Mountain Expansion To Sell Oil In Asia

Pipeline pieces

Canada may be the fourth largest producer and third largest exporter of oil in the world, but it has one sole customer of its oil—the United States.

At the end of last month, Canada took a step toward ensuring that its oil would have an export outlet to the world’s fastest-growing energy market, Asia.

Analysts believe that the federal government stepping in to save the Trans Mountain expansion project has boosted the chances that the pipeline will be built and give Canada an export outlet from the Pacific Coast to the Asian markets. The industry is cautiously optimistic, but some companies say that Canada must do more to level the playing field for its oil.

Last year, Canada’s crude oil exports increased by 6.5 percent annually to 3.3 million bpd. Of those, exports to destinations other than the U.S. accounted for just 0.8 percent of all, according to data by the National Energy Board (NEB).

Due to congested takeaway capacity and lack of enough pipelines to either the Pacific or the Atlantic Coasts, Canada’s oil is currently priced at a huge discount to the U.S. benchmark. The discount at which Western Canadian Select (WCS)—the benchmark price of oil from Canada’s oil sands delivered at Hardisty, Alberta—trades relative to West Texas Intermediate (WTI) has been US$20, and at times US$30 a barrel this year.

Fierce opposition in British Columbia has forced Kinder Morgan to reconsider its commitment to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline that would increase the daily capacity of the pipeline to 890,000 bpd from 300,000 bpd. So the Government of Canada reached an agreement with Kinder Morgan last month to buy the Trans Mountain Expansion Project and related pipeline and terminal assets for US$3.5 billion (C$4.5 billion).

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Kinder Morgan pipeline review by NEB loses 35 participants over ‘flawed’ process

August 13, 2015

Kinder Morgan pipeline review by NEB loses 35 participants over ‘flawed’ process

‘We can’t abide by the system any more. It’s too flawed,’ says former participant

Dozens of participants have dropped out of the controversial National Energy Board review of Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, saying they can no longer support a “biased” and “unfair” process.

Thirty-five commenters and interveners, including the Wilderness Committee and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, sent a letter to the board Wednesday announcing their immediate withdrawal.

“It’s a sad day. We do not like to fly in the face of regulatory processes,” said Wilderness Committee climate campaigner Eoin Madden in a phone interview. “But we can’t abide by the system any more. It’s too flawed.”

The news came as the energy board was to release its draft conditions for the pipeline expansion. Commenters have six days to respond to the conditions, which are legally required and do not mean the board has made a decision yet.

The latest departures are in addition to the earlier withdrawal of two other high-profile interveners. Economist Robyn Allan announced her exit from the “rigged” process in May, while former BC Hydro chief executive Marc Eliesen called it a “farce” when he pulled out last year.

NEB disappointed by withdrawal

Spokesperson Tara O’Donovan said the board was disappointed the participants had chosen to withdraw.

“As interveners and commenters in the process they had an opportunity to add their voice to the record, and work to influence the decision of the board,” she said in a statement.

The review includes about 400 interveners, who can provide evidence and testimony, and 1,300 commenters, who can submit letters. O’Donovan said the board will consider all submissions and it is committed to a thorough and fair environmental assessment.

 

 

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