The PQB News editorial on pipelines (B.C. Premier John Horgan’s Kinder Morgan stance is either brilliant, stupid or cynical, April 12) suggested that John Horgan is either brilliant or cynical, a wily coyote or as oblivious as a fence post. But in my opinion, Horgan should be labelled a hypocrite.
Over 400,000 barrels of crude oil are transported off the B.C. coast every day. Vancouver Island is supplied all its petroleum by barge except for one natural gas pipeline. For the past 20 years the USA has shipped over 600,000 barrels of crude oil daily down the West Coast from Alaska to U.S. markets, while on the east coast of Canada we import daily over 700,000 barrels of crude oil in tankers from foreign countries — oil that could be supplied at less cost by Canadian sources. B.C. regulates over 40,000 km of pipelines and receives close to a billion dollars in revenue yearly from the oil and gas industry. There are over 800,000 km of pipelines in Canada transporting millions of barrels of crude oil. Focusing on the Trans Mountain pipeline, Horgan has recklessly rooted his political stance to the economic detriment of B.C., several other provincial economies and Canadian unity.
Vancouver exported over 36 million tonnes of coal by ships in 2017, exceeding coal exports from all eastern U.S. ports. Recently, a group of airlines serving Vancouver International Airport announced the building of a system to supply aviation fuel in tankers from Asia to serve YVR. This includes a marine terminal on the south arm of the Fraser River, a storage facility on Port of Vancouver land and a 13-km underground pipeline through Richmond to the airport. Where are the U.S. funded environmental activists to whine about these issues, and why import aviation fuel from Asia when Kinder Morgan currently provides this service?
From my perspective, John Horgan and the opportunistic Andrew Weaver are narrow-minded hypocrites, blind to the transportation realities of the collective resource-rich economies of B.C. and Canada. Realistically, our dependence on oil is not likely to go away for decades.
Mickey Donnelly
Parksville