The hearings into the environmental costs of building the Northern Gateway Project and the court battles that will inevitably follow will drag on for years and in the end, corporate bribed PM Harpo or not, it will never be built. The big boys know that, the railway experts know it, but the environmentalists are spending huge amounts of their scarce resources to battle it.
CN Rail could move 2.6 million barrels from eastern Alberta to Prince Rupert daily with current infrastructure, while the proposed Enbridge pipeline could move only a half million barrels a day to port. When the volume eventually reaches the single-rail maximum, it’s easy to add another track to make it a double track, without disturbing any virgin wilderness. CN already owns the right-of-way, there's no assessment process needed, the First Nations have no Constitutional right to be consulted, Prince Rupert already has the westcoast's deepest harbour that already ships huge boatloads of coal and grain to Asia safely and the tankers sailing from Rupert would be nowhere near the Great Beat Rainforest or the Spirit Bears.
The Enbridge pipeline fight is a ruse, it's a straw man setup to allow the environmental lobby to go broke achieving a hollow victory during the intervening years while the Tar Sands crud[e]'s extraction machinery is being built. The Kinder-Morgan pipeline to Vancouver, who yesterday announced an application to double its already existing capacity along its long established right-of-way, and the expandable capacity of 'pipelines on rails' means the oily oligarchs have already figured out how to export the expanding capacity of their Tar Sands ecological nightmare to the yawning maw of Asia's demand.
Tar Sands Express - Enbridge's Northern Gateway seems to have been the "bait," with the "switch" to pipeline-on-rails and Kinder Morgan's TransMountain pipeline to occur at an expedient political moment.
Bitumen pipeline already exists - rail - Many railroaders in northern British Columbia can’t help but wonder why there should be a pipeline past our back door wilderness when at our front door there already is a first-class railway that can do the job with five times the capacity in less than half the time and less cost, and with more good-paying jobs - and it is under-used.
