March 19th, 2009
Tar sands to blacken MTL?
Punching holes in tar sands pipeline
Meg Hewings
A giant pipeline extension carrying over 200,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day into or through Montreal for refining has stalled because of the credit crunch.
"This is temporary," warns Macdonald Stainsby of OilSandsTruth.org . "The slowdown we are seeing in tar sands development is not because of political opposition or new environmental regulations, but a lack of excess capital available in the construction industry."
Environmental activists will use Enbridge Inc.'s shelving of the $346-million pipeline expansion to build awareness about the "path of destruction" the tar sands project will chart in local communities Canada-wide.
"The Tar Sands 'Gigaproject' is the largest industrial project in human history and also likely the most destructive, but its weak link is that every single place it wants to develop or build up a pipeline or refinery will have to crisscross local communities. This is why resistance to the project at a community level is so important... the pipelines will provide us with a map for how affected communities can work together to build opposition."
Stainsby and other environmental activists will present a talk this week at McGill called "Tar sands: Stopping the flow of destruction from the Athabasca to the Saint Lawrence," to address the broader impacts of the tar sands project on communities. The panel/talk will include speakers like Mike Mercredi, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and former tar sands worker who lives directly downstream from the vast strip mining, extraction and tar sands processing operations around Fort McMurray; Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, a freelance journalist, will discuss the Enbridge "Trailbreaker" pipeline project; Clayton Thomas-Muller, a Canadian Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign organizer, will discuss grassroots environmental justice strategy. It takes place March 20 at McGill's Leacock Building (855 Sherbrooke W.), room 26, at 7 p.m., and then moves on to Toronto, Sarnia, Ann Arbor and Chicago.
