A former Prince George mayor is hitting back at Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals’ proposed ban on oil tanker traffic along B.C.’s North Coast chalking up the initiative as "political opportunism."
“I think it’s a knee jerk reaction to the hype that’s in the media right now [about the Gulf of Mexico spill],” said Colin Kinsley, former mayor of Prince George and chair of the Northern Gateway Alliance. “With all due respect to Mr. Ignatieff, he hasn’t looked at the overall picture of the situation … we’ve been hurting for some period of time.”
The proposed initiative would pose a serious threat to Enbridge Inc.’s (TSX:ENB) proposed $5.5 billion pipeline that would carry crude from Edmonton to Kitimat where it would be shipped to foreign markets.
Kinsley’s alliance supports the regulatory review of the project, which is currently underway, and said it would inject much needed economic activity in the north.
“We’re resource-based economies,” Kinsley told BIV Wednesday morning. “We’ve been hit hard by the downturn in the U.S. housing market. Our softwood lumber market has collapsed. There are thousands of sawmill and forestry workers out of work.”
The project would impact Kitimat greatly, he said, which in recent years has fallen on hard times due to a shrinking industrial sector.
In 2005, Methanex Corp. (TSX:MX) closed its plant there. Last year, Rio Tinto Alcan slowed the modernization of its aluminum smelter plant in Kitimat, and West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. (TSX:WFT) recently shuttered its Eurocan pulp mill.
But Kitimat could also be primed for growth if a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal proposed for the port community comes to fruition (See “Apache buys 51% stake in Kitimat LNG terminal” – issue 1056, January 19-25, 2010).
In an interview Tuesday, Josh Paterson, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, said it was a "myth" that the Enbridge project would be a large source of permanent jobs for B.C.
According to Enbridge, the pipeline would create 1,150 long-term jobs across Canada during operations, but only 165 in B.C.