Memo to Premier Clark: Please stop arguing about the price tag for pipelines.

On Monday, BC Premier Christy Clark set out five “minimum conditions” that would have to be met for the province to consider any new heavy oil pipelines through BC. One of these conditions – that BC should get its “fair share” of royalties, in recognition that BC carries the bulk of the risk – has been the focus of media attention. Clark also says that governments and industry have to invest in making Canada a “world leader” in oil spill management, both on land and at sea.
At face value, these are strong words. But in reality, they mean little. And fundamentally, they completely miss the point.
What would it mean to be a ‘world leader’ in preventing, responding to, and cleaning up oil spills? Not much. Our record is so dismal that a “successful” crude oil clean up at sea can mean recapturing as little as 15% of the spilled oil. In Alaska, more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, marine ecosystems over an area the size of the entire BC coast have still not recovered.

Cleaning up diluted bitumen – which is projected to sink into the water column and cause toxic gasses that can linger for days – is even more complicated. There is no technology on earth that can clean up and restore an ecosystem damaged by a diluted bitumen spill. And there is no share of royalties that can compensate for the loss of BC’s north coast ecosystems and the Great Bear Sea – one of the richest and most spectacular ecosystems on Earth.
An important part of becoming a ‘world leader’ in managing oil spills is to identify those places where they will never be allowed to happen. The Great Bear is one such place. Not here. Not ever. Not at any price.
 
Join us and the Coastal First Nations in taking a stand on this issue by becoming a Canadian for the Great Bear.