Let's see, we have the following proposals facing the province:

1. Northern Gateway Pipeline

2. Montana coal trains dropping their open-car loads of poor quality coal at the Fraser Docks in Surrey for transport up the Georgia Straight to Texada Island on open barges for transfer to ocean-going ships, with abundant coal dust release all along the way from the mines in the U.S.

3. Piping jet fuel from giant storage tanks along the Fraser River to Vancouver Airport

4. Liquid Natural Gas refineries and shipping

This is a government and business community hell bent on funneling every sort of disastrous, harmful, toxic material through one of the most beautiful and unspoiled parts of the world. What could possibly go wrong?

Should the Raven Coal proposal be included in that list? This controversial proposal figured in the Comox Valley's last provincial election: Greens said, "No"; NDP said, "We're studying it"; BC Liberals said, "We'll protect the shellfish industry in nearby Baynes Sound". Now, when one understands that two levels of local government, including all 3 CV municipalities and the CV Regional District, plus the Islands Trust, plus all Valley Ratepayers Associations and Improvement Districts had announced their respective oppositions to the Raven Coal proposal, one can see why the NDP failed to win this seat---they might as well have announced their full endorsement of this unpopular proposal, for all it was worth; as it turned out, their reticence to take a strong position (or really any position), the only party so wary---or so stupid---probably contributed to the substantial increase in Green support which, as has been the case five elections (fed and prov) in a row here, effectively split the vote in favour of incumbent BC Liberal Don MacRae. Within a few days, MacRae announced the rejection of Raven's application (the reviewing agency found major non-compliance with existing environmental regulations)---a savvy political career move on his part. He was the only real contender that appeared to be listening and it probably helped him squeeze a win in this perennially tight riding (that is, tightly split).

Nevertheless, Raven, after purging it's executive suite, has vowed to reapply.

I asked the NDP candidate specifically about the party's position on Raven and was stunned, along with everyone else, that she steadfastly refused to engage with what was probably the hottest button issue in the Valley, saying she hadn't received the official policy directive yet. Obviously she was constrained under the "positive campaign" rubric that went on to lose the contest for the NDP, despite being 20 percentage points in the lead at the beginning of the campaign.

The NDP needn't have been so lilly-livered: the substantial majority of voters in the CV were against Raven---even otherwise pro-development Don MacRae could see that. I hope the chastised version of the NDP gets it this time: the majority of BC is against tankers on the coast---you don't need to play cute little games like Kinder Morgan, the opposition already exists, it's a freebie, a gift, a given.

Smarten up, NDP!

Well said Scotty!

Don't forget the Kinder Morgan expansion proposal, which, if built, would more than triple the amount of bitumen being transported to the lower mainland for export..

I am praying to all gods that Vancouverites smight this evil!

If this pipeline is built like the southern leg of keystone then there is big trouble ahead.
www.citizenorg.documents/Keystone%20report/20%November%20213.pdf

The most astounding is the governments full backing to build 1000 kms of pipeline through the landslide capital of Canada and then put 1 to 3 tankers a day though some very hazardous waters along a coast overdue for the big one, and the inevitable tsunami....

All for a measly $40 million dollars a year in taxes,,, total insanity.

Exactly. We're the cheap date on this one. I say charge for every unit pumped through BC. That's how they pipeline companies charge their customers, why the hell should we be different. With BC's Sarah Palin at the helm I won't hold my breath.

That is because while Charlie Chaplin had the Keystone Kops, Canada thanks to Harper and his band, has the Keystone Kriminals.

What is the difference between Harper conservatives and U.S. republicans? Answer: in Canada Harper has control of the steering wheel.

It doesn't matter who you vote for because you're just voting for more of the same, usually worse never better.

Sir John A our first PM had to step down in his first term in the face of charges of corruption.

Why pin a totally dysfunctional system broken by corruption all on Harper when nothing has changed since confederation?

You have got to be kidding! The damage to Canadian institutions, scientifically proven stats, dismantallying of formally protected areas etc etc etc have all been instituted by. Harper since he has had a MAJORITY govt!!
This driven ideolically man will not stop until WE THE VOTERS stop him!! Please read and listen to other venues available OTHER than Canadian MainStream Media. You and people like you are going to be responsible for the distraction of Canadian Democracy...

The voters stopped Trudeau from royal declarations including the NEB, the voters stopped Mulroney from funding overspending with the illegal GST and then the voters stopped the Liberals from putting more MPs in office with funds pilfered from the national treasury,,, and replaced them with Harpers crew.
People like Me.
If there were more like me the corruption would have ended decades ago but thanks to neo partisan blather from people like You, we have governments that think getting elected is ownership of the country.

We all knew that Harper's appointees were going to support the Enbridge pipeline. This changes nothing. The battle is still on and personally I hope it continues right up to election day in 2015.

Good to see that one of the three members of the Panel is a professional geologist with a university degree and is also an Aboriginal.

And no doubt he was chosen because he was on the same page as the guy doing the appointing.

Probably because he is qualified and the best person for the job.

Some people are still chosen for leadership roles because of their capabilities.

But not those 3.

The narrow judgemental evaluation of someone who may not think like you is what causes so much strife and dissent. As Savoy Brown sang many years ago; "Wouldn't it be a real drag now, if we were all the same. Listen carefully with an open Heart, the person you speak of may support your cause or may espouse an intelligent position, although if that were the case, it may never be able to penetrate your closed mind!

That sounds like you're paraphrasing the philosopher Monty Python who once said, "Its people like you that cause unrest".

Not in the Harper government they're not, they are chosen because they will tow the line.

Yup, find an Indian willing to sell out is not hard at all, just tell me that Patrick Brazeau was the best man for the job.

yah sure a university degree makes him infallible and uncorruptable.

Duh!

If he's pro fossil fuel industry, then *of course* that university degree makes him infallible and uncorruptable.

But if he supports the AGW / Climate Change consensus (that rapidly dumping vast amounts of fossil CO2 back into the atmosphere is a major problem) then he'd *obviously* be most venally corrupt -- or at least horribly incompetent.

Haven't you been paying attention?

.
(Yes, that's sarcasm) :P

I want to believe that the JRP has the best interests of Canadians in mind, when they table their decision. I want to remain positive regarding the pipelines and the tankers. But why should I? I have seen a lifetime of destruction in this province. We have always sold all of our resources at rock bottom prices and destroyed this beautiful province in the process.
I am an ex-fisherman, who witnessed all the fish stocks get plundered in just a short generation, I worked as a forestry worker and saw our forests razed and rivers and streams wrecked for a few cents a stump. And now that the government legislated all the value added stipulations out of those industries, they are skeletons of their former selves. There are few fishermen left, save for the corporate takeover of the fleet and the buyers, not to mention the government supported, foreign, corporate fish farm industry that are threatening the wild stocks.
All the sawmills are long gone and we send our forests in the form of raw logs overseas, only to be sold back to us as toothpicks and Canadian Tire flyers.
So, with no fish left and no forests left, now the government wants us to yet again trust them to manage a resource that will be shipped in raw form straight out of Canada to foreign markets, only to be shipped back to us as a value added product.
With no jobs, very little economic benefit, dangerous environmental impacts and no value added, we must be absolutely f@#&ing insane to get on board with this.

And I haven't even touched on the 'discredited' science of climate change.

Excellent analysis, tony. Enbridge and our whole sick, collectivizing economic system is a prime example of the presently ongoing crime wave,to, distort physical realities to enslave humanity and destroy the Earth with the use of imaginary monetary figures. .

"collectivizing economic system "
Amazing how not so long ago (and even now) that those words would never have come out of a rightista's moouth except in derision. And now the hypocrites stand behind it even while condemning it.

Somebody must be Listening to Mis-info wars Yes collected by the .005% at the top. Give me my liberty and property rights...so I can own the world instead of Rothschild.

Man!---we've taken it, haven't we? Last few years--- Harper, Campbell, Christy, Northern Gateway---BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!...feels like we're lookin' at the world outta the corner of one swollen eye sometimes.

You managed to avoid the word "sustainable", maybe out of fashion by now but still worthy of consideration. Best thing to happen in the woods for a long while was Harcourt's Forest Practices Code, policy made not by industry but by a variety of interests, with the public weal at the top. The Code meant sustainability of "socio-economic" prosperity with accessible public discretion over the disbursement of wealth derived from Crown forests---a process that sustains year after year forever, paying for schools, roads, wages, profit, etc. In contrast, BC Liberal policy sustains only the harvest of trees but, since most of them are exported raw, not the schools, roads, etc. that payroll and consumer taxes used to sustain from the same volume of cut. Willful neglect of inventory has become a key ingredient in the BC Liberals' accounting cookbook, allowing for hidden re-allocations and reclassifications of timber and forest tenure---like a shell game that always favours the house--- friends of the BC Liberal party, that is. TFL holders have been allowed to withdraw the private portions of their licence ---supposedly the ingredient that qualifies cutting rights over the Crown portion---to avoid managing it to public standards. Cabinet has allowed, by fiat, favoured forest companies to take their private land out of the tax shelter that was supposed to incentivize keeping it in continuous forest production--- without repaying the discounted tax, the critical aspect of the incentive. Fortunately bad governments are temporary, the forest is vast and it grows back.

Sometimes I wonder if tar sand development might be more acceptable to me if it presented with maximum socio-economic sustainability, you know, local value-adding, generous support of social infrastructure, sustainable---but is that really sustainable when the manifold liabilities of environmental degradation are accounted for? I imagine adding up all the scrubbers and skimmers and hazmat suits, incinerators, vitrifyers, land fills, reman factories and everything required to keep from going into the red environmentally; I imagine a very big number to pay for all this but but, hey, maybe the resource is valuable enough to sustain even that; I'll leave it to the environmental law guys. A bit academic at this point because what's being proposed is far, far from sustainable and that's were the focus has to be for now.

The neo-right ethos behind Northern Gate Way and tar sand development in general has absolutely no intention of sustaining the project nor does it even pretend to. The entire rationale is unabashedly about profiteering, about minimizing obstacles and costs, about squeezing subsidy from taxpayers. Risk is vitally necessary, we're told. Even if socio-economic sustainability is admitted, it is either dismissed out of hand or immunities are demanded. Neo-rightists think you can sustain growth. Now that's insane. And dangerous because they also expect someone else to pay for clean-up.

I agree with you on the Forest Practices Code, it was a good start for BC's forests. Much of that has been lost now, with all the environmental legislation handed down from our corporatist overlords. The code stated that 12% of BC's forest would be set aside for future generations and the entire industry is up in arms. I remember huge protests at the legislature, with thousands of forest industry workers in attendance.
I lived in a town that thrived on logging and you dared not ever speak up or question the 'sustainability' of things, it was like Redneck McCarthyism.
I suspect many voices in small towns all across this country will never be heard for the same reason. It is no more culturally acceptable to live in Squamish and critique logging than it is to live in Grande Prairie and admonish big oil.
Media, public and private is framing the questions in a simple and concise format and the issue at hand is much larger.
Without even mentioning the impact of a single oil spill, whatever the size, the real question is when are we going to take climate change seriously?
The climate deniers are fewer but louder and more well funded, as the battle between real science and bogus science rages on.
The question will eventually evolve into whether or not we can sustain this level of industrial resource extraction without completely destroying the environment on which we depend for survival. The simplistic nature of the conversation that is being had right now, between citizens, the government and industry, must move on from 'should we or shouldn't we' build a pipeline, to 'how can we build an entirely new economic system', without costing ourselves the economy itself?
We can easily begin to wind down our addiction to fossil fuels, while simultaneously growing jobs in the renewable energy sector.
I am really tired of it being fed to us as a choice between one and the other. We can have both and will have both some day.
It's going to be a fight, that's all. The dragons of industry will battle us on every front.
This is why we are seeing a massive PR campaign in every medium, everywhere we turn these days.
Our own government uses our tax dollars to spread disinformation about the tar sands, pipelines and tankers, while we, the citizens, stand in opposition. What is wrong with that picture?
That is a corporate takeover of our democratic system and the propaganda is paid for by us.
Whether you are on the left or the right, that should alarm you.

http://focusonline.ca/?q=no...
Government’s reluctance to limit logging in wilderness areas makes no sense when you do the math

WHO ARE YOU?

Uh.....Santa Clause?

The $1.2 billion in government revenue over 30 years is chump change compared to the $64B BC is in debt. The wasted energy and GHG produced pumping and shipping bitumen half way around the world only to ship valued added back comes at an enormous cost compared to value added industry and jobs here.

A pipeline is not an economic plan for Canada its a fools plan. Value added is an economic plan for Canadians.

BC built hydro dams in the 50s that generated value added industries as well as electricity. Now we export almost everything just like Alberta and they are still, after 40 years of pumping bitumen, is still running a deficit.

That's what happens when you vote against the worst, you get rid of a bunch of deadbeats only to replace them with more of the same.

Vote for something in the next election, vote for Canadian value added industry from Our raw resources.

As Ed Deak would say, shipping the stuff out of the country doesn't do the country any good at all. Anyone who believes otherwise is sniffing pixie dust. I mean, Rich Colman has as much as said that the BC government will not be charging any royalties on LNG exports. So how then is LNG the "savior" of BC?

Its not. It costs more to put LNG on tankers than it sells for. Its only a shiny diversion so BC can run up the debt to $80 or $100 billion while saying,,, don't worry we will all be gazillionairs by 2020.

Yes, Richard, because the sale of resources is not an income, but a liability.

The facts are distorted with imaginary monetary figures to fool the sucker public who elects these corrupt governments pushing the free trade rackets for directorships.. .

Nothing to do with Enbridge, but it also came out today that the per capita debt in Canada is now just under $28,000. Yet the crooks are calling this disaster a "growth of the GDP"

Just some more fraud to mislead the public into a worldwide dictatorship brought on by a most likely, long planned crash encouraged by present governments all over the world. .

While I generally agree, I'm not sure about the idea that the sale of resources is necessarily a liability. I mean, it certainly is in the global capitalism context (we pay a parasite premium) but it doesn't have to be this way. If Canadians make something we need out of our resources, and, for the sake of argument, we make it net-green, it is an asset, no?

Value added industries and the jobs is absolutely an asset, how is it not when compared to dumping raw resources for chump change???

I recall years ago when a judge found an insurance company guilty of
fraud, the Judge said quote “you cannot have a track record of 100%
denial and still make the claim you’re in the insurance business,
because you’re not insuring anyone, your only taking their money”

The NEB has a track record of 100% approval, meaning their mandate must be a
rubber stamp of approval for industry. Almost 100% of the testimony and
evidence given were in opposition to this pipeline, so let me be the
first to say the NEB is guilty of fraud and collusion, with either
Harper or with the shareholders of the companies involved.

Endbridge major shareholder > BCIMC, or as it's more commonly known, the BC Government Employees Pension Plan
Half a Billion bucks in Endbridge stock.
Why is the BC Fed silent on this? Well?

with ALL pensions totally invested in stocks and bonds 99% ? of pensioners rely on the robber baron banks and oil barons to fund their retirement income.

I understand that, and I'll correct you slightly, Commercial real estate is also a prominent investment option found in most Plans including BCIMC.
But that has nothing to do with Endbridge which is the topic here. The message I'm getting from reading the Tyee is the public unions in particular (not so much the private unions) are dead set against NG. That being the case why don't they demand - because they can - that THEIR Pension board divest itself of it's half billion dollars of Endbridge stocks and invest in something more......ethical?
Why the silence. To me that just makes them greedy shareholders too.
Do as we say, not as we do

The BC Teachers' Federation has been pushing the pension board to divest of its' Enbridge stock for years now, but is meeting stiff resistance. Doing as they say, but being blocked by govt. Put blame where it belongs.

I did put the blame where it belongs.. The unions hold the majority of representatives on the Pension investment board over the government representatives. The facts are all in here, no guessing or assuming or political bias, just the facts

http://www.bcimc.com/

hear, hear!!
truer words ..

The Mayor of Calgary says saying no to 1000 kms of pipeline through landside country while putting tankers off our coast all for a measly $40 million a year,,, estimated... is petty politics.
Its petty politics to export raw resources instead of developing value added industry. Thousands of years of the salmon people and the future of BC is not petty politics. These overblown Albertans cant appreciate natures beauty because theve turned their province into such a sh,hole, its just petty politics to turn BC into the same wasteland.
To the petty and greedy Mayor of Calgary, I cant attach any pics to this format so in leu of a finger, go f urself.

I said this before but it needs repeating.
When Newfoundland and Labrador developed hydro
projects in Labrador, they set up a transmission through Quebec. Quebec charged
a fee for this line, much to the chagrin of Newfoundland. So when Newfoundland
and Labrador planned another project, they decided to transmit the power across
the Gulf of St. Lawrence and New Brunswick because it would be cheaper. The
idea of a province charging another province a fee for transporting energy
products is not new in this country. If Alberta gets its way and the pipeline
is built across BC, they better be ready to pay the price of using the province
of British Columbia as a gateway.

It's more complicated than you write and different. Newfoundland and Labrador did not set up a transmission line in Quebec. The province of Quebec built and maintains the line.

"CF(L)Co (The Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation) began construction on Churchill Falls Generating Station in 1966 and on May 12, 1969, signed a power contract with Hydro-Québec. The agreement committed Hydro-Québec to buy most of the plant's output at one-quarter of a cent per kilowatt-hour — the exact rate is 0.25425¢ per kilowatt-hour until 2016 and 0.20¢ for the last 25 years of the contract, to build and maintain power lines to carry the power to market and to enter into a risk-sharing agreement whereas the Quebec Crown corporation would cover part of the interest risk and buy some of BRINCO's ( British Newfoundland Development Corporation) debt, in exchange for an increased share in CF(L)Co."

Yes, the arrangement was contentious but it was twice affirmed.
"The Supreme Court of Canada declared the Upper Churchill Water Rights Reversion Act ultra vires in 1984,[5] and twice affirmed the validity of the 1969 contract in 1988."

I don't disagree with your comments. Nfld had to go along with what Quebec wanted if they wished to transmit their power through Quebec to the US. Now they are putting together another development and they plan to transmit the power to Nfld, then across the water to Nova Scotia, then New Brunswick to the USA. This way they will avoid Quebec and hopefully a loss in revenue.

Go here for more info on this project.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/cana...

It appears to me that a province can control or charge another province to transmit its energy.