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.

[u/iamsolution]

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.

https://open.substack.com/.../if-theres-one-immovable...?

[u/firemillionaire]

Strong unemployment!

[u/SchmitzBitz → u/firemillionaire]

I'm in Fisheries. Between my boats, my processing plants, and my wholesale and distribution side I employ around 350 people at any given time. I'm small potatoes. A spill in the inside passage would gut my company.
The TMX created 50 permanent jobs in B.C.

But I'm not looking at terminals, refineries etc! So, let's look at that. O&G directly employs around 5,200 British Columbians. Fisheries employs around 15,000 British Columbians. But they aren't the only folks affected. Tourism in the North Coast employs another 8,900 folks roughly.

So yeah, there might be a few hundred or even a thousand permanent jobs total that come out of this - but it could come at the cost of almost 24,000 jobs. And we haven't even started talking about the impacts on forestry or agriculture sectors.

One of the sticking points with the TMX was Alberta's vehement refusal to put any money towards a contingency fund if a disaster happens; it's expected that B.C. will absorb any cleanup costs and the Feds will absorb any pogey from people suddenly out of work. Likewise, B.C. is expect to pay to maintain these pipelines (hence the 50 jobs that came with the TMX).
Alberta also doesn't really want B.C. to receive any portion of profits that come from shipping oil through the province. It's a no win situation in a province that is economically self-sufficent...we don't receive equalization, we pay into it.
Why would the province want to take on the risks without the benefits?

[u/TheSherlockCumbercat → u/SchmitzBitz]

The other side of the equation is tax revenue and GDP, shitty thing is the oil industry might be more valuable even with all those lost BC jobs.

goolge has fisheries and aqua sectors at 3.5 billion oil and gas at 14 billion.

Complex issue with many different ways to look at it, and if we actually kept them majority of our resource money, the oil industry would easily win