Transitioning

The BC Liberals have just offered the sword of surrender to Enbridge and Ottawa as the organ-grinder’s monkey, Environment Minister Terry Lake, made clear in a statement today.

Separating the pepper from the fly shit, the Liberals want more money and more environmental safeguards imposed upon Enbridge, which must be severely monitored by the feds. (With the same enthusiasm the Department of Fisheries and Oceans safeguards our Pacific Salmon, no doubt.)

As I said here recently, Premier Clark has declared that BC is a whore, the only thing to be decided being how much?

Let me place matters on the table once more:

1.    There will be ruptures in this 1,100 km. pipeline by the admission of Enbridge and now conceded as the only possible inference to be drawn from Lake’s statement demanding better clean-up arrangements.

2.    This pipeline goes over two mountain ranges and through a dense wilderness and is inaccessible to any cleanup undertaking. To make this plain to this corrupt bunch, you cannot get to the spills.

3.    Such is the nature of the bitumen to be piped you can't clean it up even if you could get to it.

4.    The pipeline becomes a permanent serial polluter with one environmental catastrophe following another.

Of course Premier Clark will have her “demands” met.

More money is a slam dunk because there’s a hell of a lot of it available. It will start with offers to build the port facilities at Kitimat – which is sort of like offering to donate your the grave and headstone if you’ll commit suicide. There will be royalty sharing offered along with lots of cash to buy off First Nations.

Of course the feds and Enbridge will meet the demands in the press release which were:

The province wants limits to liability in the event of an oil spill to ensure there are sufficient financial resources to properly address the effects of a spill and it is calling for increased federal government response.

B.C. also wants tougher federal rules requiring industry to provide and replace marine response equipment.

And the province wants a Natural Resources Damage Assessment process to give certainty that a responsible party will address all costs associated with a spill.

The naiveté is breathtaking! Why, I imagine Prime Minister Harper will even say “cross my heart and hope to die” when he makes the solemn pledges!

This is an act of craven cowardice to help the bedraggled, leader challenged BC Liberals for the May 2013 election.

Harper will come up with oodles of safeguards just as the BC government did with fish farms and will pursue them with the same diligence his government and the BC government has with the Fish Farmers.

I don’t mean to be rude, folks, but how do you compensate for lost or badly polluted fish habitat, starving caribou and polluted rivers? How do you put a dollar figure on shattered ecologies? How do you compensate First Nations for lost hunting grounds? How do you compensate the tourist industry for their lost revenues?

Perhaps most importantly, what is the going rate for a province that has just sold its soul?

Premier Clark and her bedraggled, divided gutless cabinet and caucus have sold us out in hopes they can rally the right wing back into the fold and you can bet the ranch that Harper will go easy on the BC government when the HST expires next April as part of this surrender package.

Our provincial government, in place to protect our province’s integrity has, as predicted, sold us out for a mess of pottage in a sorry attempt to save its grubby political hide.

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