[herbie]

Couple of idiots onboard eh? Think we like those raw logs going out? HUNDREDS of millworkers here in my town out of work. Stores, cafes closed, services cut.
So what do you suggest? It's the goddam BC Liberals allowing raw log exports to grow. Would we vote NDP next year? There ain't no one but them and the Greens.
And oh yeah, suck up the poor old oil companies. They'd never, never rip you off. Suppose it was the NDP and non-existent carbon tax that made gas prices in Alberta higher than they were here this summer?

[JaredMilne]

Thanos Thanos:

Good news here with the feds saying they still support Keystone XL as well.

So three lines out of five approved. In this political climate that's actually quite a major victory for the industry. And I'll give full credit to Trudeau who got what he wanted in terms of "social license" and also lived up to his word to grant the approvals when he was convinced better environmental input had been acheived. Screw both the federal NDP and Tories who stuck to their respective job-killing extremist ideologies (anti-oil-altogether in the case of the Dippers and anti-carbon-pricing-altogether in the case of the Tories) and now look like fools for it. Gateway wasn't going to happen, period, and the pressure to get the Line 9 reversal/extension approved disappears which means we can tell the likes of Denis Coderre to go fuck his hat because we don't need his "input" anymore. So between this and OPEC getting closer to the agreement on their own production cuts there are signs now that the two-year nightmare might be coming to an end over the next year or so.

I have to admit I'm deeply torn about this.

On the one hand, new pipelines are exactly what Alberta needs, and anything that makes us less dependent on the U.S. as our only major customer is welcome. If oilpatch workers here in Wild Rose Country can get back to work, and other parts of Canada can benefit from the spinoffs that will come, so much the better.

Whatever the state of the green energy industry, it's still in its terrible twos at most, if not still its infancy. Not to mention that we need fossil fuels for heating, transportation (including up north) and manufacturing right now-it's one thing to transition off fossil fuels, but what will we use for all the devices we take for granted, including the devices that Indigenous and environmental activists use to rally opposition to pipelines, redevelop languages, and other things like that? I don't mind seeing our tax dollars redirected more efficiently-writers like Doug Cuthand and John Ralston Saul have some worthwhile ideas-but like it or not, oil and gas are one of our big economic drivers, and where will we make up the shortfall in tax dollars if we nix oil and gas altogether?

On the other hand, I can't dismiss the concerns of the Indigenous activists and other BCers who are so concerned about the pipelines either. Remember that we even had CPC supporters like Gunnair who came out against Northern Gateway, and the pipeline spills are all too common still-one of the reasons why North Dakota has become such a gong show is that the Standing Rock Sioux are somehow expected to assume the risk to their water and sacred sites, even though the pipeline was routed in their direction to keep it away from Bismarck's water supply.

At a time when the government is spending public money in lawsuits over things like the Sixties Scoop (which it supposedly isn't responsible for, even though it owned up to the discrimination against the Ukrainians, Japanese and others during the World Wars and provided compensation), when the "doctrine of discovery" blithely assumes that Indigenous people don't have any land rights and that North America was a blank slate for Europeans to take and use, and incidents ranging from the Val d'Or discrimination to the Site C dam construction endangering other Indigenous lands and sacred sites, this is seen by many Indigenous people as yet another slap in the face-and an especially painful one, considering how important these rituals and connections to their local land actually are-and telling them to "just be Canadian" is like asking a lot of them to peel off their own skin-that's how important their Treaty rights are to their identities.

So I have very mixed emotions about all this. And it doesn't help when Jim Carr talked about the military and police being deployed at protests...because that worked so well at conflicts like Oka and Ipperwash. All that happened was we ended up with an international black eye, people dead...and the Mohawks and Ojibwe eventually retained or regained the disputed land anyway.

[JaredMilne]

Something else to think about, too...

One of the things discussed in this thread has been the way we keep exporting raw logs, oil and other resources instead of refining more of it here. That's one of the things that stands out for me the most-how much we suck in economic productivity and innovation compared to other countries, and how much we rely on our resources to get by.

It was almost 15 years ago that Mel Hurtig (RIP) wrote about how one of the big reasons for this is that we're content to remain a branch plant economy, and branch plants aren't especially innovative on their own. That problem has only been entrenched under NAFTA...which makes me wonder whether, for us as a country, Donald Trump's scrapping of NAFTA might not be a blessing in disguise. If we had the willpower to do it, we might want to see what we could learn from other countries that seem to be up-and-coming economic players, instead of sticking to the same tired old model that's given us such mixed results.

That said, I don't know if Justin Trudeau is the right man for the job on that file.

[Thanos]

Gotta take our wins when we get them, lad. Been far too few over the last couple of years and too many of our people have had to pay the full price as a result of what's happened.