(l-r) Ron Plain, Ben Powless, Maude Barlow, Caleb Behn
About 75 people came out for a discussion on the Line 9 pipeline at the Centretown United Church in Ottawa yesterday evening. The public forum, moderated by Emma Lui, featured Dave Vasey, Maude Barlow, Caleb Behn, Ben Powless and Ron Plain.
Enbridge (the company behind the Northern Gateway pipeline) wants to reverse the flow of the existing Line 9 pipeline in Ontario and Quebec so that it can move 300,000 barrels per day of light crude oil, likely diluted bitumen from the tar sands, and at a later date heavy crude, from Alberta through Sarnia to Hamilton and onto Montreal. The pipeline route passes through 99 towns and cities and 14 Indigenous communities, several of which have already expressed their opposition to it, as well as through the Great Lakes watershed. While Enbridge does not frame Line 9 as part of a larger export pipeline plan, concerns have been raised that there is an existing Montreal-to-Portland pipeline that could be reversed to take the oil into the United States, and it has been noted in the business media that exporting oil from the east coast is a shorter distance to India (than from the west coast), and a possible export route to China and Europe.
For more about Line 9, please see http://canadians.org/blog/?p=18206, http://canadians.org/blog/?p=18255 and http://canadians.org/blog/?p=17147.
