A blog to give a voice to our concern about the continued erosion of our democratic processes not only within the House of Commons and within our electoral system but also throughout our society. Here you will find articles about the current problems within our parliamentary democracy, about actions both good and bad by our elected representatives, about possible solutions, opinions and debate about the state of democracy in Canada, and about our roles/responsibilities as democratic citizens. We invite your thoughtful and polite comments upon our posts and ask those who wish to post longer articles or share ideas on this subject to submit them for inclusion as a guest post.
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Saturday, April 14, 2018

An Exelent Compromise.....

British Columbia premier, John Horgan, has an eminently reasonable solution to Justin Trudeau's and Rachel Notley's pipeline fetish - refine that cruddy bitumen here and sell it on the Canadian market.

"If they have disposable billions, I would suggest a better course of action would be to invest in refining capacity so that we Canadians can benefit from the jobs and we Canadians can benefit from this natural resource rather than sending it in raw form to another jurisdiction," Horgan told reporters Thursday. 
"I think it's a reasonable way forward and I would be absolutely delighted to participate." 
Federal Green Leader Elizabeth May has touted the same plan to avoid shipping more bitumen off the coast, and even suggested branding the gasoline “Fort Mac Strong.” 
“There’s not a Canadian that wouldn’t rather put Fort Mac Strong in their gas tank than buying from Venezuela and Khazakstan and Nigeria,” May said this week.

With much Trump like rhetoric coming from  all directions about the proposed increase of flow of toxic tar sand output to the west coast, to be shipped overseas via tankers it was good to read about this suggestion which seems to be the only reasonable compromise to this delema. Expecting Alberta and Trudeau to consider this idea or the other players to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring such a thing to fruition is however dreaming in technicolor I fear. Notley was going on about buying out Kinder Morgan but investing in refining capacity would be a much better idea and more profitable in the long run as unfortunately it will be many years before we are able to get all our energy needs from 'clean' sources.


A tip of the hat to The Disaffected Lib for this one.....
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2 comments:

Lorne said...

While I am opposed to any further extraction of bitumen that will only contribute further to greenhouse gas emissions, Rural, the suggestion of Alberta refinery development would at least spare B.C. coastline the added risk of spillage posed by the twinning of Trans Mountain.

Rural said...

Whilst the increased potential of spills from a twinned pipeline is very troubling it is the tripling of the tanker traffic and inability to clean up ocean spills in any meaningful way that should stop the process in its tracks Lorne.