If the Trudeau government wants to regain public trust, the new process announced today must include an effective climate test and respect the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, says the Council of Canadians.
“It’s time to break free from fossil fuels,” says Harjap Grewal, Pacific Regional Organizer with the Council of Canadians. “Moving to a 100 per cent clean energy economy by 2050 and doing our part to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C requires real change in these reviews. It means saying no to tar sands export pipelines like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain.”
Texas-based Kinder Morgan is proposing to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline from northern Alberta to the British Columbia coast to increase the pipeline's capacity from 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000 barrels per day. The pipeline would carry diluted bitumen from the tar sands through Jasper National Park into the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, across the Vedder Fan aquifer and the municipality of Chilliwack’s protected groundwater zone, then across the Fraser River to the Westridge Marine Terminal at Burrard Inlet. Once there, the bitumen would be loaded onto more than 400 export mega-tankers each year.
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