Salmon, economy and oil: Smithers mayor explains opposition to Enbridge pipeline

I sat next to Taylor on a flight from Vancouver to Smithers two years ago.  He struck me as being a very intelligent and engaging individual.  I'm glad to see that he is able to see through the smoke and mirrors of Enbridge and oppose this pipeline as a terrible idea.  The pipeline will do nothing to create lasting local jobs.  What it will create is a temporary influx of migrant worker jobs (as in boom towns in North Dakota).  As is common with an influx of migrant workers most areas have seen property values decline and things like crime rates and substance abuse increase dramatically.

The mayor should be the Enviornment Minister. A voice of sanity .

As someone who earns his living in the oil & gas industries and lives in Terrace, BC - I believe I offer a fairly balanced perspective. In short - if the 'Gateway' pipeline is built, there will some day be a leak...there is no question and no argument anyone can make to dissuade me from that conviction. If supertankers start carrying oil up and down the Douglas channel and along the storm-torn BC coast, there will be a marine accident ...see above. For many of you who have never seen it, Dilbit is pich black, tarry goop that gets absolutely everywhere when only a little bit is spilled on the ground. At every facility in fort McMurray, personnel have to wear washable booties over their footwear before they are allowed into office buildings and the control rooms. The 'diluent' they want to pipe through an equally large pipeline going the other direction is only slightly easier to look at, but you wouldn't let your kids play within a hundred meters of an open pail of it. Premium synthetic crude (PSC) oil on the other hand, produced in many of the upgraders can look much like water and the companies that produce the PSC demand a much higher price than for dilbit. Enbridge want to construct a 36" pipeline carrying both products through some of the toughest terrain in the entire country and argue the project will create a whole bunch of sustainable jobs. They are talking nonsense. An average pipeline worksite can employ over a hundred individuals in one location at peak times during construction. Even if one makes the argument that there will be several different work sites going at once, it still only adds up to hundreds of jobs that will all be gone once the pipelines are in place. There will be jobs at the storage and pumping station in Alberta and technicians will be employed whose job it is to repond to any problems at remote booster pumping stations along the way to the ocean, but there won't be that many of them with full time jobs. The storage terminal they will have to build in Kitimat will employ perhaps another thirty or forty people with perhaps some other people making some coin when a supertanker is loading and inching its' way out to the open ocean. I may even have missed someone, but it still only adds up to a few hundred jobs. Unless they are talking about the jobs for the cleanup crews? This project is an insane idea being pushed by the same get-rich-quick mentality that is producing a plethora of SAGD projects all over Alberta and Saskatchewan without the processing facilities already in place to handle the product (dilbit) being produced! It is a much cheaper proposition to just ship the raw, diluted bitumen away to someone else and let them process it than to build an upgrader or god forbid, even a refinery - to produce added value products we all use: gasoline, deisel, jet fuel, etc etc. It costs a LOT of money to build an upgrader - 5 billion or more. A modern, state of the art refinery that would use all the latest technology to minimize the environmental footprint and operate at peak efficiency could cost in excess of a trillion dollars (about a third of the US current deficit) Steven Harper and his cronies all talk about the pipeline being in the 'national interest" and although i understand where his perspective comes from, I wish we had a leader with more foresight. The oil companies and the governments are all making billions (not millions) from the oil and gas business. If someone was to step up in government and mandate that no-one else gets to suck anymore bitumen out of the ground until they have a processing facility already built to handle it, then that person would be talking my language. That person would be someone to vote for. That person would be creating real, sustainable jobs.