The Petro-Politburo Strikes Again

This time the malevolent hand of Steve Harper is obvious.

The entire Department of Fisheries and Oceans contaminants programme is being axed effective April Fool's Day.   In B.C. that means the entire staff of nine marine scientists and support staff are being canned.   Across Canada, this is the firing of almost all federal employees responsible for monitoring ocean pollution.

“The entire pollution file for the government of Canada, and marine environment in Canada’s three oceans, will be overseen by five junior biologists scattered across the country — one of which will be stationed in B.C.,” said environmental toxicologist Peter Ross., a expert on marine mammals, notably killer whales.

“I cannot think of another industrialized nation that has completely excised marine pollution from its radar,” Ross said. Hired as a research scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada in 1999, Ross was one of the nine employees who received a letter Thursday informing him his position will be “affected as your services may no longer be required due to a lack of work or discontinuance of a function.”

Any doubt that this was a targeted hit was dispelled, totally unintentionally, by a DFO spokesperson trying to polish this turd.

“Between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, we have found $79.3 million of savings for Canadians primarily by adjusting our internal operations and administration,” said Melanie Carkner, a spokesperson for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in an e-mail, Friday.

“To put the impact on employees in perspective, we will be removing about 400 positions from DFO’s 11,000-strong workforce. This works out to less than 2 per cent a year over three years.”

Okay Melanie, DFO needs to trim a paltry 2% of its workforce over the next two years, we get that.  And it starts by immediately axing the entire contaminants monitoring programme?    Sorry sweetie, that's a targeted hit and you made that obvious.

So, What's First?

What's it gonna be?   Will Harper weld the manhole cover shut on election financing?  Will he shut down any effort to clean up the Tar Sands?  Will he transform the public and armed services into agencies of the Conservative Party?  Will he shove two-tier healthcare down our throats?  Will he shred what remains of our social safety net?  Will he synchronize Canada to America's wishes?  Will he festoon the landscape with mega-prisons?  Will the most authoritarian prime minister in living memory sabotage what remains of our democracy?

Oh, I forgot, Jack Layton's going to stop him.   Whew, what a relief!

I don't know where Harper will begin but I do know what's coming to us in British Columbia.   Long before we get another trip to the polls, we're going to have a privately owned and operated supertanker port in Kitimat and a pipeline drawing toxic bitumen sludge out of the Tar Sands.

Who can forget the Exxon Valdez fiasco in Alaska's Prince William Sound?  That supertanker was only loaded with Alaskan crude oil, not utterly toxic, highly corrosive, bitumen sludge.

Just around the corner from where the Queen of the North rests on the seabed hundreds of feet below the surface, we're going to have a supertanker port that will enrich Alberta and Big Oil and leave British Columbians holding the bag for the awful risks.

Rafe Mair puts it most aptly:

As the old saying has it, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So it is with us who have taken environmental issues on as a lifetime issue. It’s not that we don’t see, understand and have passion for other issues – rather that we see the environment being urgent. If we get it wrong over the next few years – and the BC government and the Harper government have got it wrong – then the damage is forever. You simply cannot restore wild salmon runs or erase the damage of a catastrophic oil spill. On the economic side of the environment issue, if you lose your public power to private interests as we seem determined to do, it’s gone forever.

Harper wants nothing more than to forfeit public power to private interests, his permanent solution and we're just going to have to sit by and watch.

Mr. Ignatieff, Meet AFRAMAX

It's the class of oil supertanker that could soon be making regular runs through Vancouver's inner harbour, past the treacherous Second Narrows and into Burrard Inlet to haul the world's filthiest oil to Asia.

Most Canadians, and I'm sure that goes for Ignatieff, have no idea about the shoals and vicious currents that the Second Narrows is known for, at least to locals. But a 120,000 metric ton behemoth with a 32 metre beam behemoth poses no end of risks running the passage beneath the Second Narrows (Ironworkers Memorial) bridge. Ships that big transiting a narrows that challenging are a formula for disaster.

It's not that an Aframax supertanker can't get through on the high slack tide, it can. It's what happens if anything goes wrong - a rudder failure, missing the channel and running aground, hitting the damned bridge (it has happened). A ship that size getting caught in the vicious current of a five metre tide change could be dead meat, ripped apart. The spill from a ruptured, fully loaded Aframax could be several times that of the Exxon Valdez.

The devastation would be enormous. It would likely close Canada's major West Coast seaport. Booms would be useless in those tidal currents. Tourism would be hammered. The Port of Vancouver would see its freight and cruise ship business head to Seattle and other U.S. ports, permanently.

Those who advocate the Burrard Inlet tanker port correctly note that oil tankers have plied that route for 50-years without a single, major incident. True enough. But that was a limited volume of much smaller ships. That experience is meaningless when it comes to a high volume of Aframax tankers running that challenging, even dangerous route.

Here's what Ignatieff has to understand very, very soon. The core of Liberal support in the West lies in the zone that will be imperilled by the Burrard Inlet/Aframax oil route. There aren't a lot of genuinely "safe" Liberal seats in the Lower Mainland and by forcing Tar Sand oil tankers to put this region at risk, he stands to lose an awful lot more votes in those Liberal ridings than he could ever hope to gain, seats the Libs cannot afford to shed.