Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced Tuesday that Ottawa will spend $4.5 billion to buy the Trans Mountain project from Kinder Morgan, as well as its B.C. terminal. But protesters are already prepared to fight the plan until it’s scrapped, they say.
About 75 anti-pipeline activists gathered outside the Kinder Morgan facility in Burnaby, B.C. Saturday, hoping to express their displeasure over the federal government’s announcement and the damage to the environment the pipeline will create.
“Rather than go to the court to determine jurisdictions, they’re making financial decisions that affect taxpayers and they’ll have to be accountable for that,” Premier John Horgan said at the time, according to CTV News.
And some taxpayers are angry over the government’s decision to buy the pipeline, calling it a betrayal. Tzeporah Berman, a director of Stand.earth, one of the groups that organized an anti-pipeline protest in Vancouver, said: “My expectation is that the outrage is going to grow and we’re not just going it see it here in British Columbia but we’re going to see it nationally and internationally.”
Today, this writer learned that LeadNow is planning a nation-wide, non-violent protest at 100 MP offices on Monday, June 4, including Prime Minister Trudeau and Ministers Carr, McKenna and Morneau, to demand the federal government cancel its plans to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline with taxpayers’ money.
Protestors are asked to wear red and gather across Canada to rally at MP’s offices in all major cities and towns to demand cancellation of the buyout.
Trudeau, the G7 meeting, and climate change
Berman, who is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto is disappointed in Trudeau, saying: “I think a lot of us who knocked on doors for the Trudeau government really believed them when they said they were going to bring evidence-based analysis and science and democratic process back to pipeline reviews.”
And with all this going on, the Trudeau government announced Canada is joining IRENA, the world’s largest intergovernmental organization that supports countries in their transition to sustainable energy sources. I’m sure a lot of Canadians are wondering about that announcement today.
With the G7 meeting coming up on June 8 and 9 in La Malbaie, Quebec, Prime Minister Trudeau will be dodging some tough internal issues as this will be the first time President Trump visits Canada, and we all know what happened at last year’s G7 meeting when he announced the U.S. would be pulling out of the Paris Agreement.
The thing is – How will Trudeau justify the purchase of a pipeline most people don’t want — yet still be a staunch supporter of clean energy and a healthy environment?
International interests are already questioning Canada’s efforts to ramp up global climate change ambitions, especially as the Trudeau government faces criticism from environmentalists, such as former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, over its support for oilpatch expansion.
Fossil fuels are subsidized 38x more than renewables globally. Now the Canadian government wants to spend billions more of taxpayer dollars to increase its country’s contribution to the climate crisis. This is not in the public interest. We must keep fighting to StopKM.
— Al Gore (@algore) May 29, 2018
Will Canada’s backing of the Trans Mountain pipeline extension have any effect on the G7 meeting? This is particularly worrisome because the largest single source of emissions in Canada is the oil and gas sector, according to government figures, and that sector was mostly responsible for the increase of Canada’s overall carbon emissions between 1990 and 2015.
