Kinder Morgan and the Trans Mountain Pipeline: the "bitumen battle"

History shows that British Columbia's provincial politics is dominated by ideological polarization and a tendency to extremes, with no middle ground ceded in what amounts to a zero sum game where there is a ‘winner take all’ attitude.   This was most clear in Gordon Campbell’s landslide victory in 2001 when the (neo) Liberals won all but 2 seats in the Victoria legislature, reducing the (left wing) New Democratic Party to unofficial opposition status. More recently, it took a Supreme Court of Canada decision to force Liberal Leader Christy Clark to relent in her obsessions and allow B.C. teachers a say in class size and composition, a move that took some 13 years or so to come to conclusion.

Today’s NDP, likewise, is plagued by its own drive for ideological and environmental promises of purity: no to Site C dam, yes to Site C dam; no to liquified natural gas, yes to LNG; no to tolls, maybe yes to smaller tolls. But the line across the sand over which John Horgan will not cross ‘as long as he is Premier’ is the twinning of an existing Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline, in operation since 1953 – and its possible implications for the health of the B.C. coastline should a bitumen spill occur, given an increase of one tanker a day in traffic.  Needless to say, the three Green Party members (who are propping up the razor-thin NDP minority government) are also dead set against this.

Normally minority governments can be creative ventures and a boon for democracy, which is about making compromises in a complicated world, but Premier Horgan’s posturing appears to pander to a form of environmental populism which resonates widely in a province as blessed as British Columbia.  I see no NDP effort to compromise with Andrew Wilkinson’s Liberals on the other side of the legislature regarding this issue, nor any efforts to work with their NDP cousins in Alberta under Rachel Notley, nor with the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau.  Can they all be wrong?  Can the BC NDP be all right?  Should a so-called “constitutional crisis” tilt on a three-member Green alliance with the NDP in British Columbia?  I tend to disagree, but, maybe in another light, this opinion piece could be considered about fifty percent correct.