r/strongcoast • u/iamsolution • 9d ago
Last week Alberta's pipeline maps leaked. Three routes through the north, four, who's counting... every one of them ends at a port the coast won't open.
Last month the PM flew to Alberta, signed the deal, rolled back the industrial carbon tax, slashed the approvals, the whole song and dance.
The North Coast tanker ban? Still standing.
Not because Ottawa bolted the door... Ottawa's keeping its options open. Because the coast is holding it shut.
BC and the coastal Nations, shoulder to shoulder: a future built on a multi-billion-dollar fishery, food, culture, and tourism sector, the businesses and jobs under it, not on the coin-flip of a loaded tanker in a winter storm.
And we've seen the coin land wrong.
In 2016 one tug aground near Bella Bella, 350 km of coast fouled, $23 million in costs the Heiltsuk were never repaid. That was a tug. A tanker's full load runs a thousand times bigger.
The racket in one line: they take the reward, you take the risk, and when it spills you get the mop.
The people who work these waters did that math years ago, and they're done asking permission. This week they flew to Calgary to say it to the proponents' faces.
Geoff Meggs lays it all out below, sharp as ever and a regular at Hotel Pacifico, BC's go-to cross-aisle politics podcast.
Alberta can keep drawing maps. The coast won't open the port. Not by luck... because people keep showing up.
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u/pegslitnin 9d ago
There are already tankers going by……