Editor
The people of Greece are protesting major cutbacks in their life style, according to Greece opposition parties, the cutbacks are really hitting pensioners and low income people especially hard. Could this happen here in Canada, I believe so. Certainly Canada is a country rich in resources and it is those resources that provide jobs and provide the necessary support for Canada’s social safety net.
A Victoria gathering and a great percentage of our B.C. populace including indigenous people say they are against the Enbridge Pipe line project. In Greece, cutbacks, and in Canada being against pipelines and mines becomes a similar rallying cry. The question is, can a country sustain one without eventually losing the other.
Let’s take a good look at pipe lines, how many of our homes, apartment buildings, office buildings, factories, streets and highways are filled with pipelines, and how many of those pipelines fail. We do hear of accidental contact, or failure because of poor workmanship, or even the necessity to replace, as a city might, aging water lines, however, with today’s stringent standards we should expect even less failure.
If very few old pipe lines fail, why do we automatically expect new pipelines to be subject to failure?
For a great number of years major gas and oil pipelines have traversed the length and breadth of our province, including here, through theWilliams Lake area, which runs such a major gas pipeline. Pipeline failure mostly occurs (such as the Kinder Morgan pipe line failure in Burnaby) not because of a pipeline weakness, but because a machine came in contact with it, or the environment near the pipeline has been subject to some changes.
Both the CN and CP railroads are geared up and ready to move this crude oil should either the Enbridge or the Kinder Morgan pipeline submissions fail.
So how many trains, here in B.C., have been derailed in say the last 40 years compared to how many pipelines have failed in this period.
The federal government, for the economic wellbeing of the nation, may temporarily disallow the pipeline, for only as long as it takes Enbridge to resolve legitimate issues against the pipeline, underline the word legitimate.
Where concerns are raised they should be based on facts, not what ifs. Alaska successively has an 800 mile pipeline across a similar environment.
Doug Wilson
Williams Lake