People's views on the Kinder-Morgan pipeline expansion seem to differ across the board and regardless of where you stand, the result of continuous protesting on Burnaby Mountain has shown that we might be on the verge of capturing a pivotal point in our history.
This is my opinion.
The silver-bullet argument seems to be job creation. I hear this constantly because it's important. Those who favor the pipeline support economic growth, are more patriotic, understand compromise and are genuinely more clued-in to how the world functions. This is nonsense! If you have a look at who the protesters are comprised of - it's scientists, university students and teachers. The stereotype of the lanky hippie hanging out in a tree-fort, adorned with poxy banners just props up the old straw-man argument of two radically different and albeit, fictional, groups of people. Those who love work and people who are too lazy to bother looking so they'd rather beat down progress like a mangy mule.
Most of us need jobs and want an economy that can provide work for the next generation as well. The question is, at what point does the quality of those jobs start occupying the forum? I've done my fair share of cellular work around the oil-patch and met many people who've lived in places like Fort McMurray. To leverage Canada's economy on fossil fuels is plowing us into a catastrophe, both short and long-term.
In the short, most of these industry workers are well paid, but they're isolated into shifts for weeks at a time, in joyless conditions resembling a minimum-security prison camp. This is disastrous for families! The data on divorce rates, domestic assault, suicide and drug addiction in these areas only proves it and it's even worse to hear company spokesman deny it completely. I think this is putting the carriage before the horse on economics over everything else. The focus should be on mental health and creating industries that are not just feasible, but promote stability for families without forcing people to work away from home just to pay the bills. Conservatives seem to view the tar-sands like cure-all bitumen that can fill all the pot-holes in a stagnating economy.
As an example, BC could easily move toward industrialized hemp production, tomorrow.
"Justin, you hypocritical swine". Yes, I'm writing this from a computer made with petrochemicals; the microchips were undoubtedly processed with industrial technology powered by oil, my breakfast traveled via diesel trucks from outside Vancouver and I'll drive a gas-powered car many more times in my life. I get it. To say this argument has credence is to say that a guy born onto a monopoly board, with his life unequivocally dictated by narrowly set rules of the game, woke up to find his critical choices were either politicized, institutionalized or patented out of reach and he should just shut the fuck up and enjoy his freedom.
Okay, nobody's saying that we should dump oil completely and that false-dichotomy crap only muddles the debate. The fact is that the deeper we hinge our infrastructure on fossil fuels the more costly it'll be to build cleaner, sustaining industries to off-set it. And this is an inevitable decision, whether it's made by us now or the ecology that we depend upon, later. We need plans that span generations, not election cycles. Oil might be effective, but its necessity creates destabilizing wars to maintain a cost value; and it's so deeply embedded into Canadian politics that it's now become the pied-pipers tune that both the media and science need to calibrate their message to in order to maintain the narrative of progress. This is frightening.
The lack of response from our politicians, provincially and federally, is pathetic and this is another pressure valve where people have felt unrepresented for way too long. If I didn't know any better, I'd think their respect goes only as far as how measurable our titillation is with meaningless choices; paper or plastic, window or aisle...etc etc. Many people are weary of being the Pac-Man, repetitively corralled around the consumer maze. The truest form of democracy is when we become outwardly disgruntled by this illusion, only to be treated to a wall of silence. Assuming that our needs are so petty we'll be onto something more banal in the next news-cycle. And it's back to business as usual.
Unfortunately for the incumbent parties, this won't be going away any time soon. It's likely this issue will be the divine madman, descending into Dante's political hell and ready to peck the head of apathy like a carrion bird. This isn't just bringing to light people's frustration, but how oil has pervaded the legal and 'independent' bodies that are meant to look out for us. This is a peek through the keyhole, into a future where corporations make all the decisions and have the savvy to navigate the legal landscape, utilizing law enforcement and levering financially crippling injunctions against protesters for loss of profits. While we bear the cost of failure and environmental clean-up if something goes wrong. And for what we have to lose in this beautiful province, risk assessment plays its cards more like a gambler than a clairvoyant.
Legislation was clearly passed in advance of this pipeline being built; utilizing both public parks and land protected by native bylaws, this was never even legal to begin with. The proposal from Kinder Morgan was not only sold to the NEB with cursory information, but never even went through the boards proper oratory review. On top of this, the boundaries protected by the initial court-ordered Injunction were out by as much as 30m because of dodgy GPS coordinates. We export oil to China and import some of their democracy over here! Makes sense.
This might seem irrelevant to some people as long as the work flows from somewhere. But to blindly trust in one industry to float all ships, because it creates jobs, is no better than a religious fundamentalist suspending their objectivity to participate in someone else' version of morality.
This is the tipping point. For better or worse, I hope we stay engaged and maintain social pressure in reshaping all the major aspects of our lives. We deserve that choice, but it won't be handed to us without taking the gloves off and fighting for it.
