An oil soaked bird struggles against the side of the HOS an Iron Horse supply vessel at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana this week. This is what the Coastal First Nations don't ever want to see in British Columbia. (AP photo)
Art Sterritt, executive director of Canada’s Coastal First Nations, an alliance of 10 first nations groups on British Columbia’s North and Central Coast and Haida Gwaii, and Gerald Amos, of the Coastal First Nations board of directors, penned this strongly worded opinion piece for the Vancouver Sun:
Images of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil carry a grim message for Canadians. The message is simple: if Enbridge brings oil tankers to British Columbia’s coast, we will wake up one day to the same kind of disaster on our own shores.
It’s a future Coastal First Nations cannot imagine. It’s a future we won’t allow to become reality.
Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline would carry the world’s dirtiest oil from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat on the B.C. coast, to be loaded onto foreign-bound supertankers. Some 225 tankers per year would attempt to navigate the waters where a passenger ferry sank in 2006, and where last year a freighter ran aground.
Enbridge is trying to convince Canadians oil tankers are safe at a time when the oil industry has zero credibility. One has only to see photos of BP’s burning oil platform to realize the ridiculous nature of such assurances. Oil platforms are safer than oil tankers – and look what can happen to them.
As Sterritt and Amos remind readers, the Coastal First Nations are fishing people, still relying on traditional foods – wild salmon, halibut and shellfish – as a way of coping with high unemployement. “Lose this, and we lose our way of life,” they write.
Besides, they write, First Nations aren’t the only ones who’d suffer in the event of a disaster, pointing to the damage that a spill could cause British Columbia and Haida Gwaii – the Great Bear Rainforest – considered one of Canada’s greatest treasures.
Finally, they reminds readers that Coastal First Nations declared a ban on the transport of oilsands crude oil through their territories.
“It is a declaration,” they write, “we will defend by whatever means necessary.”
Enbridge? Are you listening?
Gwen Florio
Tags: Alberta oil sands, Art Sterritt, BP, British Columbia, Coastal First Nations, Enbridge, Gerald Amos, Great Bear Rainforest, Gulf of Mexico, Haida Gwaii, Kitimat, Northern Gateway Pipeline, oil spill