PM meets resistance to pipeline bail out from coast to coast
K’JIPUKTUK (Halifax) – A piercing whistle interrupted Justin Trudeau’s speech at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in Halifax on Friday.
“Justin Trudeau has made me an unwilling shareholder in the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, currently owned by Kinder Morgan,” says whistleblower and Council of Canadians organizer Robin Tress. “So I am blowing the whistle on this terrible investment and on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for brokering this bad deal.”
Resistance against Kinder Morgan is holding strong in BC and spreading across the country. The Indigenous-led legal challenges to federal and National Energy Board approvals are ongoing.
The Trudeau government announced this week it will spend $4.5 billion to buy Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs from Alberta to B.C. The government is purchasing the proposed twinning of the pipeline to carry diluted bitumen for export in coastal waters, but the construction costs aren’t even included in the purchase price.
Polls show that the majority of people in Canada are against using public money for the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Building the new pipeline would violate Indigenous rights, is inconsistent with the Paris Climate Agreement, and threatens waterways and the West Coast with a major diluted bitumen spill.
Economist Robyn Allen, who has investigated the Kinder Morgan pipeline, suggests that costs could surge to more than $15 billion for taxpayers. “Buying this pipeline will mean that government will waste billions of dollars it could have otherwise spent on providing clean drinking water on reserves, improving health care and education, taking real climate action, and so much more,” says Tress.
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Contact: Robin Tress, Council of Canadians, 902-223-8526