Two weeks ago, 11 Powell River residents (including me) got on the 5:30 am ferry and headed to Burnaby to join the many hundreds who have challenged Kinder Morgan’s injunction against blocking the gate to their tank farm.
This campaign of civil disobedience is just one more in a long history of using this legitimate political act to force necessary change when the system refuses to respond. Civil disobedience brought many of the positive changes in our lives we now take for granted.
Conditions of work is the area I am most familiar with. The 40-hour week (now eroding), minimum wage, health and safety regulations and workers compensation all came about as a result of massive civil disobedience. The largest civil disobedience campaign in Canadian history, the War in the Woods to successfully defend Clayoquot Sound from clear-cutting, saw 900 people arrested.
With respect to the Kinder Morgan pipeline campaign, some 200 people have been arrested to date. It is a very civilized process with RCMP and protesters treating each other with a wary mutual respect. Prosecution has been less accommodating as protesters are now being charged with criminal contempt of court, not civil.
Nonetheless, fines for first offenses seemed reasonable: $500. Until now. Powell River protesters Ron Berezan and Jo Ann Murray have learned that the prosecutor intends to ask for fines of $5,000 to be levied, not $500. And that’s if they plead guilty before their November trial date.
It seems obvious that this threat is intended to create a chill effect for future protestors. It is a radical departure and seems to violate what is known in law as the parity principle: that like offenders should be treated alike.
Powell River residents should be ready to support these two individuals. It is true that the pipeline has divided BC residents, including in Powell River. But support for the pipeline is based largely on blatantly misleading hype from the company, the Alberta government and prime minister Justin Trudeau, who casually betrayed his promise of reconciliation with First Nations, and who just bought the pipeline.
One of the falsehoods is if we get tar sands bitumen to tidewater, producers will get a higher price. Nonsense. There is no evidence Asian buyers will pay more for an oil product that is more expensive to process.
And what about increased tax revenue? Kinder Morgan pays almost no income tax. For example, an average of $1.5 million per year between 2009 and 2013.
And jobs? About 50 in BC after completion.
Reassuring noises are made about how safe the whole undertaking will be, yet there is virtually no comprehensive research on what happens to diluted bitumen when it spills into the ocean. Speculation by scientists is that dilbit will be impossible to clean up because up to 90 per cent of it will sink. Oil tankers are far and away the most decrepit and accident-prone seagoing ships.
Even the Globe and Mail recently published an article by a venture capital company questioning the pipeline’s viability on several counts.
All these immediate issues are in addition to the fact that expansion of the tar sands will make it impossible for Canada to meets its promised climate targets.
Is Canada a democracy run by and for the people? Or are we to be dictated to by powerful multinational oil companies?
Jo and Ron answered loud and clear.
Murray Dobbin is a Powell River freelance writer and social commentator.
