For starters, the National Energy Board’s website apparently couldn’t handle traffic from the interested multitudes.
Like many Canadians, I tried to download a digital copy of its long-awaited decision. I was kicked back to a generic paragraph announcing the decision so many times that I gave up trying to open the link to the report and turned instead to the news feeds.
A bit amusing that for such a big deal — Canada’s entire economic future supposedly hinges on the outcome — Ottawa is so inept at basic digital technology. This doesn’t instil confidence in bold promises of technological solutions.
Nevertheless, the theatre went on with suitable “alarums and excursions,” as an Elizabethan playwright’s stage instructions might have put it.
And so we have a predictable recommendation that the pipeline be approved — provided it meets 209 conditions.
The villains — who’s wearing the black hat and who the white depends entirely upon where in the audience you choose to sit — were predictably hissed and dissed by the groundlings from both sides of the stage.
Business types, predictably, claimed to be enthused and energized by the report.
“B.C. is open for business,” trumpeted the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, a line trundled out so many times over the last 50 years and now so exhausted that it’s entirely devoid of energy.
Environmentalists were predictably depressed.
“Disappointing,” said the Pembina Institute. “A major setback for science and democracy,” said Ecojustice. “A message of disrespect to British Columbians,” said the Sierra Club — the latter a telling point, at least, since polls still show opponents here outnumbering proponents by about two to one.
Pundits expressed predictable concern over the polarities revealed by the discussion.
First Nations, who probably hold the key to whether this pipeline will ever be built, predictably vowed renewed opposition.
Come on, did anyone using the most rudimentary critical reasoning think for one minute in this theatre of the absurd that the NEB was going to reject the proposal outright?
Hearings like these are essentially conducted to legitimize government policy decisions later, not to thwart them beforehand. And it’s been clear from the get-go that the federal government, with support dwindling elsewhere and its Alberta power base to appease, really wants this purported engine for expanded heavy and synthetic oil markets.
Why else were critics of the project strategically vilified in the early stages as American fifth columnists out to destroy Canada’s economy? Why were the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and the RCMP investigating organizations that expressed disfavour?
Environmentalists concerned about climate change were tarred as hypocrites because Alberta’s synthetic crude is “ethical oil” compared, say, to that from repressive petro-states — and so what if shipping bitumen to China for processing means Canada must import “unethical oil?” This was about branding, not logic.
Cabinet assigned itself the power to decide the issue. Scientists and environmentalists who wanted to address the hearings were excluded from the process by NEB fiat.
And when greeted by First Nations protesters in Bella Bella who weren’t enamoured of the pipeline proposal because it would vastly increase supertanker traffic through their traditional fishing grounds, the NEB abruptly cancelled its hearings there.
With this history, was Thursday’s decision a surprise to any but the most unpardonably naive?
Remember, though, it’s just Act II. The play’s not over. There are those 209 conditions for proponents to meet. Environmental opposition is just getting warmed up. There’s lots of science yet to be heard. Federal and provincial elections will intervene. And, frankly, if First Nations can’t be brought onside, this pipeline will be stillborn.
As Winston Churchill once observed of another serious matter: “Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Stephen Hume
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