On Sun. Feb. 9 I was watching CTV’s Question Period with host Evan Solomon.
The last interview on the program was about the Trans Mountain pipeline and the Teck Resources Frontier oil sands mine.
He was interviewing Bob Fife and Pam Palmater an indigenous woman.
It didn’t take long and I was so upset that I shut the program off.
This woman stated that they would conduct whatever protests and civil disobedience that they felt was necessary to prevent the completion of these pipelines, of course, that was no surprise.
Bob Fife was a CTV reporter and now works for the Globe and Mail. His first comment was that he could not see how the government could approve this mine with all the environmental issues that it poses.
This mine is a project proposed to last 40 years just south of Wood Buffalo Park that would cover an area about twice the size of Vancouver.
He said that the mining would destroy wetlands, old growth forest and would create a problem for the government to reach its 2050 target of net zero emissions.
When work is commenced on a project like that, just a small area is opened up and mined. When that area is mined out they move to the next area and reclamation work is started on the first area.
In this way, by the time the entire area is mined out, most of the area will have already been reclaimed including the wetlands.
There would be no environmental mess a generation after the mining is complete so what is the problem?
According to what I have read about this project in the Edmonton Sun, it would produced half as many emissions per barrel as the national average for oil production and will recycle nearly 90 per cent of the water used in extraction.
This was a $21 billion project that would have created about 7,000 jobs, including highly paid employees from the 14 Indigenous communities in the area who completely support the project.
On Sun. Feb. 23 the Teck Resources CEO withdrew its application to develop the mine stating that there were too many political and environmental impediments to proceed.
This could have been a very positive project.
What has got my goat is that the media seem to almost always interview people with a negative point of view on this and almost every issue. It seems to me that putting a positive spin on issues like that is against their journalistic principles.
If journalists like Bob Fife would take the trouble to study real climate science they would find out that Canada has already reached its 2050 emission target because our forests absorb more carbon than Canada produces.
The government has finally convinced the police to dismantle the CN blockade at Bellville, Ont.
While other blockades have been removed across the country there are more being erected in support of the Hereditary Chiefs from Wet’suwet’en.
There is still no leadership from the government to put a stop to this nonsense.
Again the national media are accommodating this illegal movement to persist by giving them free positive airtime.
While they may have an obligation to report the activity, they should at the same time be condemning the entire process.
What is going on is against the law regardless of what the Hereditary Chiefs say.
If the government allows these people to shut down the Coastal Gas Link natural gas pipeline there will never again be any natural resource infrastructure built in Canada.
That would be the beginning of Canada becoming a third world country!
It appears to me that much of the national media are in favour of the hydrocarbon industry being shutdown even if it destroys the national economy.
The national media are accommodating government inaction and that is creating a dangerous precedent.
by Herman Schwenk
