Editor:
The Trudeau government has already spent $4.5 billion on the Trans Mountain pipeline and they will need to spend at least another $9.3 billion to make this new pipeline a reality. That's $13.8 billion of taxpayer money that should be spent on literally anything else.
Any notion that there was a viable business case for this pipeline went out the window the day Kinder Morgan walked away from the project last year. In fact, the federal Parliamentary Budget Office says that a delay of two years or if the project goes over budget by just 10%, there is no way for taxpayers to ever make their money back.
The project has already been delayed by five months since the government bought it last year, and has more than doubled in cost since it was originally announced.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that if we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we cannot build any more new fossil fuel infrastructure and that includes this pipeline.
Just one oil spill from any of the hundreds of additional oil tankers this project would bring to the Salish Sea would devastate Canada’s west coast for generations.
Laura Smith
