(Pipes are seen at the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain facility in Edmonton, Thursday, April 6, 2017. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward)
Originally Published: April 18, 2018
Every day during the month of January—through the snow and the cold that grips our country in mid-winter—some 145,000 barrels of crude oil attached to railroad locomotives rolled through our cities and our towns virtually unnoticed, often in the dead of night.
This represents 23,000 cubic tonnes of potential danger.
Day-in and day-out.
Lac Megantic and the 47 lives lost five years ago in the fiery destruction of that small Quebec town when oil tankers on a runaway train exploded is fading from memory, and will continue so until … well, let’s not go there.
Let’s not think, either, of the thousands of 18-wheelers loaded with oil and refined petroleum barreling down our highways at all hours of the day.
Think too much and paranoia will seize the moment.
A while back, Forbes magazine carried a story under the headline, “Pick your poison for crude—pipeline, rail, truck or boat.”
Contributing writer James Conca gave the short answer as to what is the safest way to move the commodity that today has the Trudeau government siding with Alberta as British Columbia digs in to stop the federally-approved expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline connecting the oilsands of northern Alberta to B.C. tidewater.
“The short answer,” Conca wrote, “is truck worse than train worse than pipeline worse than boat.”
But that definition applies only to human death and property destruction.
When it comes to environmental impact, dominated by aquatic damage, it’s “boat worse than pipeline worse than truck worse than rail.”
So, choose your poison and then select your definition of “worse.”
Right now, the poison of the day is pipelines.
To B.C. Premier John Horgan, his minority NDP government wholly dependent on the support of all three elected members of the Green Party, the “worse” is Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Horgan’s national interest would appear to be his own political survival, and to hell with the billions in oilsands revenues that would help provide economic security to the rest of Canada through expanding global markets.
A poll by Angus Reid released Wednesday shows only 14% of British Columbians worry about a pipeline spill or accident should the Trans Mountain be built as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vows it will, all this in the midst of anti-pipeline protesters interrupting his official visit to Great Britain.
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