Canada does NOT support pipeline.

[NAB]

Well, on that point GB I don't believe the alternatives you mention will ever happen, I see them as just scare tactics used by the pro-pipeline side. They are simply not cost effective enough to do so at the volumes and prices involved, particularly the low prices it will take to capture any significant market share in Asia for Alberta Oil. We don't have the infrastructure in BC to deal with it that way anyway (while the US Northwest does as a pipeline terminus on an already existing pipeline route)

Nab

[The Green Barbarian]

Well, on that point GB I don't believe the alternatives you mention will ever happen, I see them as just scare tactics used by the pro-pipeline side. They are simply not cost effective enough to do so at the volumes and prices involved, particularly the low prices it will take to capture any significant market share in Asia for Alberta Oil. We don't have the infrastructure in BC to deal with it that way anyway (while the US Northwest does as a pipeline terminus on an already existing pipeline route)

Nab

really Nab? You don't think that oil can be transported via rail? Hmmm....while I am loath to use Wikipedia for a reference, this will do I guess...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_car

[NAB]

I think you are stretching a bit there GB. Of course I know oil can be transported by rail, even truck, or in pails being passed along lines of humans for that matter. But did you miss my thoughts as to why they would not be in this case?

Nab

[The Green Barbarian]

I think you are stretching a bit there GB. Of course I know oil can be transported by rail, even truck, or in pails being passed along lines of humans for that matter. But did you miss my thoughts as to why they would not be in this case?

Nab

Well I saw the part about not having the infrastructure to support transport, which while I don't know enough to comment, don't really believe.

[NAB]

I think you are stretching a bit there GB. Of course I know oil can be transported by rail, even truck, or in pails being passed along lines of humans for that matter. But did you miss my thoughts as to why they would not be in this case?

Nab

Well I saw the part about not having the infrastructure to support transport, which while I don't know enough to comment, don't really believe.

Well, you apparently missed a lot more than that GB, and it is very hard to have a productive discussion with folk who believe something or have an opinion on something while admitting that they don't know enough about them to discuss the facts or detail. So I'll just move on to other things and leave you with it rather than end up going in circles.

Nab

[The Green Barbarian]

I think you are stretching a bit there GB. Of course I know oil can be transported by rail, even truck, or in pails being passed along lines of humans for that matter. But did you miss my thoughts as to why they would not be in this case?

Nab

Well I saw the part about not having the infrastructure to support transport, which while I don't know enough to comment, don't really believe.

Well, you apparently missed a lot more than that GB, and it is very hard to have a productive discussion with folk who believe something or have an opinion on something while admitting that they don't know enough about them to discuss the facts or detail. So I'll just move on to other things and leave you with it rather than end up going in circles.

Nab

That's probably best Nab. You're never going to convince me that we'll be unable to sell our oil to China, just because a bunch of panicky idiots block a pipeline to Kitimat. Where there's a will there's a way - and as usual, the enviro-nuts have us cutting off our nose to spite our face, I fear.

[Urbane]

The poll shows 48% in favour of the pipeline and 32% against. Those numbers can be spun to show that a majority are not in favour (pretty close though) but those not in favour of the pipeline are even further away from a majority.

[The Green Barbarian]

The poll shows 48% in favour of the pipeline and 32% against. Those numbers can be spun to show that a majority are not in favour (pretty close though) but those not in favour of the pipeline are even further away from a majority.

Evan Solomon had a panel on this on Newsworld yesterday. I only caught the end of it but the Conservative on the panel was pointing out that a "Mob the Mic" campaign has been started, mostly with foreign money, designed to delay this pipeline for as long as possible, with long drawn-out hearings that really serve nobody's interests. The NDP and Liberal pundits were of course crying about how the Conservatives have to let everyone have their say, which is just plain silly, as this whole Mob the Mic nonsense is just a political action by foreigners. But trust the NDP and Liberals to be on the wrong side of a debate once again.

Here's a bit on the Mob the Mic foreigner interventionists I could find:

http://dogwoodinitiative.org/blog/mob-the-mic-success

Is this pipeline a good idea? I think so. But it's up to Canadians to make that decision, not foreign socialists who aren't going to be there to pay for our social programs if/when our economic activity goes down the drain.

[twobits]

And how many thousand registered to speak? I'm thinking both pro and con will get just a tad repetative after the first hundred if not sooner. The chair should be empowered to cut off anyone, pro or con if the argument raised has already been heard and documented. This hearing will be nothing but a glorified fillibuster if not.

[The Green Barbarian]

And how many thousand registered to speak? I'm thinking both pro and con will get just a tad repetative after the first hundred if not sooner. The chair should be empowered to cut off anyone, pro or con if the argument raised has already been heard and documented. This hearing will be nothing but a glorified fillibuster if not.

That's exactly what it is - a glorified filibuster.

Today, the federal government panel reviewing the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline to the west coast begins its public hearings. Over 4,500 people — including many foreigners, and even minor children — have registered to testify, just to gum up the procedure.

Sheila Leggett, the clueless bureaucrat running the review, has lost control of the process. Instead of weeding out irrelevant, repetitive and non-Canadian witnesses, she unilaterally declared she’d add on an entire extra year of hearings so that every single man, woman and elementary school child in the world can use the review as some sort of political soapbox. Canada’s economic development and thousands of jobs will take a back seat to Leggett’s personal Oprah Winfrey Show.

Fortunately, adult supervision has arrived in the form of Joe Oliver, the National Resources minister. Yesterday he announced that if Leggett won’t protect the integrity of the review from foreign-funded environmental extremists, he will.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” Oliver wrote in a public letter. “They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”

That’s all true. But it’s worse than that. Leggett hasn’t just allowed the panel to be swamped by foreign witnesses, such as Hugo Chavez’s state-owned oil company CITGO, and environmentalist front-groups paid for by U.S. billionaires like the Rockefellers.

Being “hijacked” implies that Leggett is just a naive, passive victim of scheming foreigners. But it’s even worse than that. Leggett herself is actively demonstrating bias.

Here’s an example. The official rules of Leggett’s panel say that people who wanted to register to speak had to do so by Oct. 6, 2011.

Clear enough. And rules are rules, right?

Wrong. Leggett kept letting new people register to testify against the pipeline after the deadline passed. Over a hundred new people were sneaked in after Oct. 6 including Kat Haber from Alaska. Patricia Rypka from New York. And Ines Gudic from Brazil.

These aren’t experts in pipelines. They’re just people who clicked on the review panel’s website — little more effort than clicking “like” on Facebook. Yet Leggett let them sneak through and register after the rules said registrations were closed.

You can see the full list of 4,522 registrations online, sorted by date, on their website (the site loads slowly).

They’re fun to click on. Some are Canadian. Some are fake. Some are duplicates. Some are minor children. But Sheila Leggett has agreed to hear from all of them. Even those registered after the rules said they weren’t allowed to.

As a test, a representative of EthicalOil.org, the Canadian NGO I founded, contacted Leggett’s staff to see if a pro-oilsands supporter could register late, too.

No way, was the answer.

Got it?

If you’re an anti-Canadian activist from Alaska or New York or Brazil, Leggett will let you jam up the hearings. Even if you register after the rules say registrations are closed.

But if you’re a Canadian citizen who supports the oilsands, Leggett will slam the door in your face.

It’s bad enough that Leggett has allowed foreign moneyed interests to hijack her panel. But by having two sets of rules for who can register — one standard for foreign meddlers, and a stricter standard for Canadian patriots — Leggett shows not only incompetence, but bias, too.

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/09/big-time-bias

[Urbane]

Kelly McParland: Big Environment gets a pass on pipeline tactics, as usual

Kelly McParland Jan 11, 2012

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have been getting pummeled for suggesting Big Environment might not always employ the most scrupulous of methods when attempting to achieve its goals.

In this case the goal is to block a pipeline from being built to Kitimat, B.C. for the purpose of shipping oil to Asia. Harper’s suggestion, expanded on by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, is that Canadian environmental activists are being financed by foreign entities skilled at tactics that could disrupt the public hearings that are just getting underway.

Shame, cry the critics, appalled that Ottawa would cast aspersions on the good name of the sainted organizations that exist only to ensure our planet is handed over in pristine condition to the next generation. Don’t they know that environmentalism is next to godliness, and that any besmirching of its aims, practices and ambitions is akin to questioning motherhood itself? Environmentalism, we’ve been taught, is to be taken at its word. It cannot be questioned.

Liberal leader Bob Rae interrupted his welcoming party for NDP MP Lise St-Denis long enough to denounce the Prime Minister once again for undermining and endangering democracy. “I think it is inappropriate for a minister or a prime minister to interfere and intervene and frankly to intimidate an environmental process as it would be to interfere or intervene in a court case,” he said. The government “does not understand the rule of law. It does not respect due process.”

This is, what, three or four hundred times Rae has accused the Tories of undermining democracy? If he’s even close to being correct, by now we must rank somewhere below North Korea in the democracy stakes. Mr. Rae has been joined by learned opinion-leaders from the Ontario Pundit Association, who have declared the Prime Minister’s actions unspeakable, retrograde, underhanded, reprehensible and hypocritical. The government’s case is a “radical attack on due process.” It is “high parody” and “deeply disturbing.”

And it really upsets the environmentalists.

All the moaning could be true. It’s certainly more than a little rich to complain of foreign money and influence being brought to bear against the oil industry, of all things. The biggest, richest, most influential transnational organization in the world. The whole point of the pipeline is to make it easier to send oil to China, which has invested billions in the oilsands and has a full-time cheering section assigned to promoting its Canadian interests. Do you think that cutesy Xinhua reporter (since recalled) who sent flirtatious emails to Bob Dechert just happened to fix on the parliamentary secretary to the Foreign Minister, rather than, say the minister of state for sport?

No, the Tories have never been rich on irony. But what’s also noteworthy about the fusillade its position has attracted is that hardly anyone wants to talk about whether it’s true. Because, um … it just might be. Rather than spend its time marching around the press gallery harrumphing at the Tories’ gall, for example, The Calgary Herald started checking out some of the 4,522 people who have registered to state their case against the pipeline, and discovered Ines Gudic of Santos, Brazil, who has never heard of the Northern Gateway project and doesn’t know why she’s on a list to oppose it in Kitimat.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said the 53-year-old woman on Tuesday from her home.

“I have never heard of this pipeline and I did not apply to speak in Canada,” she said, in broken English.

… Gudic’s daughter, Flavia, also has never heard of the pipeline.

“Maybe the environmental organizations we donate to signed us up,” offered Flavia, a 19-year-old art student.

“We donate to Greenpeace and PETA,” she said. “We care about the environment and animals, so that’s what I think happened.”

They also found Elano Ferraz, from Bom Despacho, Brazil, who similarly said the pipeline was news to him. Both Ferraz and Ms. Gudic are members of something called the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, and thought maybe someone there had signed them up. Simon Jackson, founder of Spirit Bear, says that could never ever happen, as does Greenpeace, because that would be “completely unethical.”

Maybe they’re telling the truth. But it’s not hard to recognize the benefits of lengthening the process, as was successfully achieved in the U.S., where the Keystone pipeline was delayed by a year (and thus, perhaps, forever) despite the thousands of jobs it promised for the struggling U.S. economy, and the energy security it offered at a time the Middle East is worrying about nuclear attacks.

If you can plug up the process, you can prevent an honest and objective decision from being made. Harper’s critics are willing to believe he’s ready to use devious tactics to have his way, but aren’t interested in discovering whether Big Environment is willing to play just as dirty. Which they’ve shown time and again that they are.

National Post

[NAB]

I still think that when a country buys into globalization for it's own primary benefit, even freely has its say in the affairs of other countries of the global community with respect to issues that have a global impact, it is damned hypocritical to turn around and object to those from other countries being granted the same privilege with respect to our activities, or even try to block their participation. We are either part of the world economy or we are not. We cannot have it just one way, the way that benefits only us.

Nab

[LoneWolf_53]

We are either part of the world economy or we are not. We cannot have it just one way, the way that benefits only us.

Nab

Tell that to the Americans.

[Rwede]

Foreigners have no say in what we decide to do within our borders. We pay our taxes in this country so that we may have a say on the resources that belong to us. Foreigners have no jurisdiction here.

Kudos to the Harper Government for calling these radical environmental terrorists out. Greenpeace, Spirit Bear, Suzuki, and PETA are nothing but shams.

[The Green Barbarian]

I still think that when a country buys into globalization for it's own primary benefit, even freely has its say in the affairs of other countries of the global community with respect to issues that have a global impact, it is damned hypocritical to turn around and object to those from other countries being granted the same privilege with respect to our activities, or even try to block their participation. We are either part of the world economy or we are not. We cannot have it just one way, the way that benefits only us.

Nab

what are you even talking about Nab? Globalization? We are selling oil to the Chinese. How is that "globalization"? It's two countries conducting trade. Are you going to go to Guadalajara and protest that the Mexicans are selling large sombreros to the Japanese? It appears what you are doing is trying to make a very simple issue - selling a resource to another country - a complex one. That just makes no sense.