It's still peaceful on Burnaby Mountain today.. The injunction has, as many expected, increased attendence at the defender's camp. More than 800 people showed up at 4pm yesterday – the exact time a B.C.-Supreme-Court-ordered-Kinder-Morgan injunction took effect. Those attending to the conservation park on the mountain lately have seldom seen a larger crowd. "Youth, seniors, native, non-native all showed up in force", said The Vancouver Observer.
Solidarity is in the air, the tanker threat to Burrard Inlet and the Georgia Strait is obvious. As it is already every week Kinder-Morgan [KM] ships 1,000,000+ barrels of Tar Sands crap through Burrard Inlet. We are already, as Rafe Mair says, "risking it all".Why? Because the Trans Mountain Pipeline means big bucks for their US Investors who know well how to grease palms and 'pressure' holdouts.
Kinder-Morgan has done its job. They've bought and coerced their way into lax regulations in B.C. and Canada and, as Robyn Allen explains in today's article at The Tyee, 'Trans Mountain Pipeline: Big Bucks for US Investors, Peanuts for Us', the firm pays minimal taxes here, sometimes none. Kinder-Morgan is a typical corporate criminal, they won't just stop and change their ways.
IMO KM will end up offering a compromise. A compromise that's been their first choice all along. KM will offer to send all of the pipeline's new [and maybe it's existing capacity], to Cherry Point in Washington St. There's already a spur line, KM has been sending a small flow there for decades. In the last decade the Cherry Point joint has been re-tooled to refine tar sands crud instead of the much lighter Alaskan oil it was built to handle.
Dustin Rivers from Squamish Nation (Skwxwú7mesh-Kwakwaka’wakw) gives a speech denouncing the Kinder-Morgan expansion yesterday.
Helicopters and planes buzzed overhead last night and today. TV crews, satellite trucks, photographers and film-makers, are everywhere, apparently a drone was seen, too. The First Nations are untied all along the pipeline route. My body is to old and i live to far away, but, like millions of people and countless others throughout the biosphere, my heart is on Burnaby Mountain.
