Oil-sands workers press MPs to oppose ‘wrongheaded’ Keystone pipeline

The union that represents many of the workers in Alberta’s oil patch will be on Parliament Hill on Thursday to ask politicians to oppose a pipeline that will carry bitumen to the southern United States for processing.

“We’re going to get into a lot of detail with MPs,” Dave Cole, the president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, said of the Keystone XL project, which has also been the subject of protests in the United States where regulators are taking a hard look at it.

Mr. Cole and his colleagues will also be holding a news conference to tell Canadians why they want the pipeline stopped. Although the pipeline would be exporting bitumen extracted in Canada, it is a job killer, he said.

His workers, he said, do the job of upgrading the bitumen here in Canada before it becomes oil. But, if the pipeline goes through, that upgrading will be done in the United States.

“The Americans will get the jobs and Albertans, Canadians will get the pollution. It is wrongheaded for the economy of Canada,” Mr. Cole said.

“It’s export on steroid,” he said. “It’s bad for the industry. It inflates prices. It causes unnecessary pressure on supplies and labour shortages just so somebody can make a quick buck. It doesn’t deal with any of the footprint problems of the environment.”

Of course, not everyone in the oil patch sees it that way.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver spent several days in Washington last month trying to persuade the Americans to approve an extension of the controversial pipeline .

TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline “would help the U.S. move to a more secure energy future through a socially and environmentally responsible partner in Canada,” Mr. Oliver said at the time.

“It would also bring more than $20-billion in new construction related spending to the U.S. economy and create 20,000 well-paid construction and manufacturing jobs.”

But Mr. Cole said that, one the pipeline is constructed, it will take just 30 people to keep it running

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Source: Globe&Mail