oceaneleven wrote: Spagetti Man,
Where there’s a bill, there’s a way, so Independent Senator Douglas Black tabled Bill S-245 to declare the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion to be in the national interest.
“We’ve allowed this flag to just flap in the wind for so long that we are where we are,” Black testified Tuesday at the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications. “We are on the verge of the breakdown of the rule of law on this issue, and we as senators cannot condone it.”
With 30 days until Kinder Morgan’s deadline to guarantee the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, Black is trying to use the declaratory power in the Constitution to give the federal government leverage to stop protests in British Columbia. The B.C. government has gone to the provincial court of appeal with a reference case that is stalling construction, while Indigenous groups and climate activists from Canada and the United States are ready to put their bodies in front of the bitumen. Kinder Morgan is scheduled in July to start expanding the pipeline, but the only thing expanding so far is a picket line.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has discussed giving money to Kinder Morgan to compensate it for the uncertainty and has declared, “we will get this pipeline built.” However, the House of Commons has so far failed to referee the western skirmish, and it’s the Senate that is stepping in with legislation to get the pipeline built.
“We couldn’t get [Northern] Gateway done. We couldn’t get Energy East done. We couldn’t get Petronas LNG done, and we are on the verge of not getting Trans Mountain done,” Black said. He noted Ontario imports gas from the United States: “we look like fools.”
The Canadian government has declared projects to be in the national interest about 500 times in the past, using Section 92 of the Constitution mostly to push forward railroad projects, and Black wants to use it to build a project that Kinder Morgan says would bring Canadians $7.4 billion and the equivalent of 15,000 construction jobs per year of operation.
“I think there needs to be foundation for action, that the government of Canada can say, ‘We have this authority. We hope we don’t have to use it, but if we have to use it, we will use it in order to get pipeline built,” said Black, “so that Burnaby can’t interfere with simple things like road access, road closure … access to water, access to sewage—all things that can be done by a municipality, which can drive this, which can simply stop the project.”
Kinder Morgan released a statement in early April, warning, “If we cannot reach agreement by May 31st, it is difficult to conceive of any scenario in which we would proceed with the Project.”