Around 50 members of Burnaby Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansion (BROKE) braved freezing temperatures Wednesday night and held a Kinder Morgan protest outside the Executive Plaza Hotel in Coquitlam.
The two-hour rally coincided with a Trans Mountain open house, the first one held since the Liberal cabinet gave the $6.8-billion proposed pipeline expansion project the green light on Nov. 29.
About a dozen Trans Mountain staff, all dressed in green, stood in one of the conference rooms upstairs amidst information boards and answered questions from attendees.
Downstairs was a different picture. The sounds of drums, singing and various chants could be heard across Lougheed Highway. A handful of police officers kept an eye on the proceedings.
Burnaby resident and SFU professor Bob Hackett emceed the rally. He told the NOW the anti-pipeline group had three reasons for showing up. The first was to counteract what he called “misinformation” being provided by the company.
“We want to offer another side of the story, which we think is more complete and accurate,” he said. “The second is to send a message to Kinder Morgan and its investors and the spineless politicians who have allowed this to happen.”
The third reason, Hackett noted, was to get signatures from people interested in forming a new group called CROKE – Coquitlam Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansions.
Sandy Ang, who’s lived in Coquitlam for more than 30 years, came out to the rally and said her biggest concern about the pipeline project is having diluted bitumen go under the Fraser River.
“If this diluted bitumen goes into the Fraser River, we’re not getting it out and we’re not having any salmon survive that,” she said.
The mother of two added she’s worried about her kids’ futures.
“I’m going to be gone before the worst effects of the fossil fuel industry really hit home, but I’m going to have kids and I’m going to have grandchildren, and I just can’t imagine not taking a strong stand right now because one day they’re going to ask me, ‘What were you doing when these kind of decisions were made?’ I want to say I did everything I could,” Ang said.
Pam Johnson has lived in the Ash Grove neighbourhood, near the pipeline route and at the bottom of Burnaby Mountain, for 23 years. She told the NOW she’s opposed to the project and attended the open house to learn more about “what their final plan was.”
“I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to lose my home,” she said, noting her house isn’t on the proposed route. “I’m still very unhappy with it. I have no idea how that many tanks are going to sit there and that they can reassure us that everything’s going to be OK. I’m just totally disgusted by this. I can’t believe what a huge backwards this is for us. We need to be moving forward, looking for cleaner solutions.”
Johnson added she and her family are considering moving out of the city.
“That’s painful. This is dangerous; this is scary,” she said.
More open houses
Ali Hounsell, spokesperson for the Trans Mountain expansion project, said more open houses have been scheduled along the proposed route in the months ahead. Construction on the Edmonton-to-Burnaby pipeline is supposed to start this September with an estimated in-service date of December 2019.
“We’ve sort of moved from the stage of if to how. People are asking us about jobs; they’re asking about what the plan is for construction. We understand that the folks downstairs may not want to have that conversation, but at the end of the day, we have our federal approval, we have our regulatory approval and we have 157 conditions that we need to meet,” she said.
“People have a right to their opinions. Certainly we’re not here to change anyone’s mind, but you can also see within the room, there’s a lot of people who are interested in having conversations, asking questions and learning more.”
Asked about the court challenges the project is currently facing, including an appeal by the City of Burnaby in the Federal Court of Appeal, Hounsell said “things will work themselves out.”
“It will be up to the courts to decide if and how and whether anything changes along the way. But we’re going to keep moving forward and operating as we have in order to get the project done,” she said.
