A view through the looking-glass

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Re: B.C. a playground for eco-stunts (BC Views, NewsLeader, Dec. 7)

In his column condemning efforts to stop the massive Enbridge plan to build a tar sands gunk pipeline across B.C., Tom Fletcher appears to have passed through the looking-glass into a bitumen-blessed wonderland of his own making.

His mirror seems to show him a wide range of environment-concerned organizations who must be ignored because they fail to welcome the invitation to almost certain oil spill disaster. Nothing in the glass about Enbridge, under orders by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency, now entering a second winter trying to clean up the mess made in July 2010, when an Enbridge pipeline ruptured in Michigan, sending an estimated 819,000 gallons of greasy gunk into the Kalamazoo River.

According to Fletcher, such a thing could never happen (for some unexplained reason) in British Columbia. It just wouldn’t dare, I suppose.

Nothing upsetting about the pack of Enbridge reps rushing around like blind dogs in a meat-house trying to coax First Nations bands into making a deal with Enbridge’s Northern Sludgeway instead of firmly opposing it.

And the best answer he could find in his looking-glass about efforts to also head off expansion of the Kinder Morgan gunkline to feed oil tankers in Burnaby? Why, oil tankers already are heading out under Lions Gate Bridge; all the expansion would do, ha ha, is make the existing situation worse.

But Fletcher sees a bogeyman in the fact that a few local environmental protection groups receive some funding from U.S. organizations. This is obviously unfair, since Big Oil in the U.S. would never consider being involved in a Canadian pipeline dispute. Well, maybe some millions here and there, but...

There in looking-glass land, it seems that free speech is okay, as long as it speaks in favour of reinforcing the toxic grip Big Oil has on the world.

Tony Eberts

New Westminster