NDP Finance Critic Nathan Cullen brought his Take Back Our Coast road show to Port Alberni on Sunday June 22, and while there were few Nuu-chah-nulth faces in the audience, there was widespread agreement that B.C. First Nations play a pivotal role in opposing the proposed Enbridge/Northern Gateway pipeline.
Cullen is the Member of Parliament for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, which extends from the Yukon border to just south of Bella Bella, and includes the proposed Enbridge terminal at Kitimat, Haida Gwai and the notoriously dangerous waters off the coast.
Port Alberni was the 15th town hall meeting for Cullen following the federal approval of Northern Gateway last week. On June 20, the MP attended the Chain of Hope event in Hartley Bay, where women from Gitga'at First Nation stretched a 7,000-metre long crocheted rope across Douglas Channel, where hundreds of massive supertankers would navigate each year if the pipeline is built.
“I was there as the young Gitga'at women paddled the chain across the channel,” Cullen said, describing the scene as they brought the line on shore, singing all the while.
When the chain came ashore, Cullen said he realized that it was strung with pictures of children and the names and crests of elders who have passed on.
“It's a thin thing, and I thought, 'How does it stretch seven kilometres and not break?' It's so strong, as things that seem so fragile sometimes are.”
Cullen likened the chain to the people of Hartley Bay.
“It looks fragile: a small village with not a lot of money and not a lot of power, but incredibly strong and united. They're amazingly powerful.”
Using a Powerpoint presentation, Cullen put up a photo of the proposed shipping route.
“This is where the tankers go through three 90-degree turns,” he said, which produced audible gasps of dismay from audience members.
Cullen noted that it is only now becoming widely known that the Northern Gateway project involves two pipelines. The main pipeline would bring diluted bitumen (dilbit) from Alberta to waiting supertankers in Kitimat.
At the same time, tankers loaded with diluent would be arriving in Kitimat, where it would be pumped into a secondary pipeline back to Alberta.
The raw bitumen is a heavy oil similar to asphalt. Mix it with sand and gravel and you get pavement. It must be heated and diluted with a solvent to make it flow in a pipeline, at a higher pressure than conventional crude.
The diluting agent is a witches' brew of hydrocarbon byproducts removed during the processing of natural gas.
Cullen said, as an intervener during the Enbridge hearings, he underwent weeks of frustration trying to get a straight answer on whether dilbit would float in the event of a tanker spill.
Later, it was revealed that tests by Fisheries and Oceans Canada had already determined that the heavy oil does, in fact sink to the seabed where, presumably, it would mix with sand and gravel to form pavement.
“Here's a suggestion for this discussion: the term 'cleanup' should be removed from our vocabulary,” he said.
The MP said the performance record of the company also raises alarm bells.
“Enbridge has not been good about keeping the oil in the pipelines,” he said, citing a number of recent leaks, including a massive, 3.3 million litre spill into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.
Using former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed as an authority, Cullen said the Enbridge project fails the test in a whole range of areas, not the least of which is the relative scarcity of benefits for B.C., versus the multitude of threats to the environment.
And according to Lougheed, among the major oil-producing nations, Alberta/Canada receives among the lowest royalties at the wellhead—lower, in fact, than Nigeria.
The oil extraction company, Nexen, is a state-owned entity of the Chinese government, as is the shipping company and most of the various companies slated to build the twin pipelines.
“At what point does this project become not-Canadian?” Cullen asked, rhetorically.
The MP pointed out that the Conservative Party would be horrified at the notion of a Canadian state-owned business, but apparently finds a top-to-bottom Chinese-owned operation acceptable.
Speaking to Ha-Shilth-Sa after the meeting, Cullen pointed out that one of the selling points of the project is that China has pledged to pay top-dollar for what is normally a low-value crude. But that argument becomes essentially meaningless when the money is changing hands from one state-owned enterprise to another, under a low-ball royalty structure, he explained.
Faced with overwhelming opposition from the people of B.C., Cullen said the announcement that the project had been conditionally approved came with little fanfare, and had B.C. Conservative members ducking for cover.
“It wasn't 'the Harper Government' that day, it was 'the Canadian government,'” he said.
Cullen said the Harper Government has attempted to stymie opposition by changing the rules and setting up roadblocks, sometimes in the most trivial areas. For example, presenters at the hearings were prohibited from singing.
“In Haida Gwai, a group of young kids had written a song, in Haida, about the pipeline. They came in with their song and were about to dance, and the panel shut them down. The Haida weren't impressed.”
Cullen said the pipeline threat has brought about a new consensus among the First Nations in his riding. On Friday, he said, Gitga'at chiefs told him ongoing conflicts with the Kikatla and Haisla nations have been set aside.
“They said, 'Enbridge didn't mean to do this, the Conservative government didn't mean to do this, but it has brought us together in ways we didn't think possible.'”
Recently, the City of Kitimat held a plebiscite on whether to accept the project. Cullen said under the rules that were imposed, residents in adjacent Kitamaat Village were not allowed to vote.
On voting day, Cullen said he waited for the results with Haisla elders, along with non-aboriginal members of the Douglas Channel Watch. When the final votes were counted, the residents of Kitimat had rejected the proposal.
Calling it “one of the most beautiful things” he had ever experienced, the Haisla people formed a circle around the MP and the Douglas Channel Watch members and sang their Appreciation Song.
“It was beautiful because it was about neighbours, trying to talk to neighbours,” he said.
Cullen said with 21 B.C. ridings currently held by the Conservatives, and with massive opposition to Enbridge, the 2015 federal election could be decided in B.C.
In a question-and-answer session, one attendee, who said she has been working with Hupacasath in the legal fight against the Canada/China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA), questioned whether an NDP government would be able to overturn it if elected.
Cullen acknowledged that FIPA was not even brought before the House before the signing, and it could prove extremely difficult to overturn.
“FIPA is the war - Enbridge is just the battle,” she warned.
Tla-o-qui-aht member Laura Fraser (Ciia qaap) warned that the Harper Government, by way of one of its many omnibus bills, is quietly chipping away at the enshrined First Nations right to receive protection from the Canadian military.
“They could take away our right to protection from Canadian Forces by labeling us 'terrorists' or 'enemies of the state,'” she said.
While that may sound over the top, Cullen said a recent Harper Government news release branded Enbridge opponents “foreign-funded radicals” and “enemies of the state,” so the definition has already been floated.
“The idea of a sitting government calling its own people 'enemies of the state' is a moment we should pay attention to,” he said.
After the meeting, Cullen was asked if the NDP Party has any strategy to maintain the growing partnerships with First Nations beyond the pipeline fight.
Cullen acknowledged that the Northern Gateway fight, in drawing together such disparate allies, has created a window of opportunity to forge a better relationship between First Nations and non-First Nations across the country.
“But it is only truly transformative if the people, based on that success, continue to work together. Being from the Northwest, First Nations are integral in my thinking and my belief in what happens in the future.”
Cullen suggested that, while plugging away at Northern Gateway in such a toxic fashion, the Harper Government is actually poisoning the prospects for other, more sustainable resource development in the province.
“You learn trust by working together. And we have been working together with First Nations in unprecedented fashion. To be an ally is not a passing moment. It means you are connected, and share, and understand one another.”
