Michael Riordon

the view from where I live

Tag Archives: Alberta


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Crude crimes: Another pipeline spill, another “Plan B.”

Last Thursday 200,000 liters of crude oil spilled into the North Saskatchewan River, soaking wildlife and forcing cities to shut off public water supply.  Details here.

Husky Energy victims, N SaskA great blue heron, victim of Husky Energy.  (Photo: Lend a Paw Animal Rescue/Facebook)

The pipeline started to leak on Thursday July 21.  It continued to spill into the river for four days, 200,000 litres of toxic crude oil, before perpetrator Husky Energy shut it down.

This is the latest of dozens of catastrophic pipeline spills across North America in the past three years.  But right on cue and with dazzling gall, Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley leapt to defend the indefensible.  “Even with this spill it remains the case that absolutely the safest way to transport oil and gas is by way of pipeline,” she told the Canadian Press.  “Had a spill occurred on rail there might well be injuries involved.  In everything you do there are risks, but I would suggest overall the risks [of pipelines] are low.”

In the sheltered halls of power perhaps, but for the rest of us out here in the real world, this is crude bullshit, insult piled on injury.  Of course hauling crude oil by train has also proven catastrophic.  Ships too.  There is no safe way to extract, move, refine or use this stuff.  It’s a disaster, start to finish.  Only safe solution: Leave it in the ground.

Speaking of no safe way, how does this one rate?  TransCanada’s Terrifying “Plan B”.

How do the executives, investors and their government enablers continue to profit so richly from their serial crimes against nature and humanity?

Why are they not in jail?


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A dirty deal

In the previous post I mentioned the extreme dangers that secretly-negotiated, corporate-dictated international trade deals pose to our fragile planet, and our efforts to defend it.

A nightmarish example of such a deal is the prettily named Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), recently signed by – among other perpetrators – a representative of the former Northern Republican (aka Conservative) regime in Canada, just before they got the electoral boot.

Please note: The TPP is not a done deal for Canada until the newly constituted Parliament ratifies it.  As of now, the Liberal majority looks alarmingly prepared to do so, but with enough public pressure, who knows what might happen…

Due to lack of time and space, I didn’t provide details on the actual dangers of the TPP to the earth and its inhabitants.

Well, here they are, in a new report just released: the dirty details of a very deadly deal.

Tar sands 3

Tar sands: a former landscape in Alberta, Canada


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“Clean-up efforts are underway.”

The bad news:  Alberta pipeline spills 60,000 liters of crude oil into muskeg.

The spin: As usual, the industry and its government partners assure us that “clean-up efforts are underway.”  What else can they say, spill after spill…

Tar sands pipelines

Tar sands pipelines.  Image: newrepublic.com

The worse news:  The industry is poised to send millions of gallons of this muck via pipelines and trains across thousands of kilometres/miles through every kind of terrain and aquifer to the west and east coasts, and south through the US.

The good news:  Every step of the way, courageous people are resisting.

At Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, more than 100 resisters have been arrested to date for trying to block a scheme by the Texas-based Kinder Morgan corporation to ram a pipeline through the mountain.

Canada’s National Energy Board granted the company rubber-stamp approval to proceed with test drilling, despite the fact that the pipeline will cross – invade, actually – territory which the Indigenous First Nations have never legally ceded to either the federal or provincial government.

In May, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation launched the first Indigenous legal challenge to oil sands pipelines crossing B.C., in a direct challenge to the National Energy Board’s deeply flawed ‘review’ process.

Last week, a provincial court judge threw out the charges against the Burnaby Mountain resisters, which included both First Nations and non-First Nations citizens.

Unfortunately, the judge’s ruling was based on Kinder Morgan having provided inaccurate GPS boundaries for its drilling sites, which leaves the company free to get a new revised injunction against the resisters.

Stakes for resisters also rose sharply when Kinder Morgan launched a $5.6 million lawsuit against several resisters and two university professors who have spoken out against the company’s pipeline test work on Burnaby Mountain.

Still, as the enormity of the threat become more and more apparent, resistance continues to grow across the continent. It takes many forms. This past week, Concordia University in Montreal became the first Canadian university to start divesting from fossil fuels.

For a scientist’s insight on the tar sands and climate change, see chapter 9, in Bold Scientists.  Read an excerpt here.  Scroll down to ‘Pesky data.’


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Canadian government spies on tar sands opponents

Shocking, but not surprising:

tar sandsPhoto: vtdigger.org

Through Access to Information searches, investigative journalist Matthew Millar reveals in the Vancouver Observer that the National Energy Board, a federal agency, coordinates a secret ongoing surveillance campaign against Alberta tar-sands opponents.  The NEB collaborates with CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service), the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which has its own national security apparatus), as well as private corporations implicated in the Alberta tar-sands and proposed  pipelines.

This makes sense only as an (ideo)logical extension of the Harper regime’s faithful service to the oil and gas industry, combined with the paranoia of a repressive regime, as in:

Anger erupts over Harper’s ‘enemy’ list.  The National Post, July 17, 2013.

Government labels environmentalists “terrorist threat” in new report.  The Vancouver Observer, Feb 10, 2012.

Stay tuned…

What’s Next? when science, nature and power collide.  Coming in 2014 from Between the Lines, Canada.