Six People Arrested Inside Enbridge Hearings

Van­cou­ver, BC / Coast Sal­ish Ter­ri­to­ries – This morn­ing (15th Jan), six peo­ple direct­ly inter­vened in the Enbridge pipeline joint Envi­ron­men­tal Assess­ment and Ener­gy Board hear­ings and put cli­mate change on the agen­da.

Van­cou­ver, BC / Coast Sal­ish Ter­ri­to­ries – This morn­ing (15th Jan), six peo­ple direct­ly inter­vened in the Enbridge pipeline joint Envi­ron­men­tal Assess­ment and Ener­gy Board hear­ings and put cli­mate change on the agen­da. The group man­aged to make their way past police unde­tect­ed and into the secured 4th floor of Vancouver’s Sher­a­ton Wall Cen­ter. Once inside they revealed shirts embla­zoned with mes­sages like “Stop the Pipelines” and pro­ceed­ed to use police tape to cor­don off the hear­ing area as a “cli­mate crime scene.”

“Cli­mate change is killing thou­sands of peo­ple every year, pri­mar­i­ly in devel­op­ing coun­tries and Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties that are the least respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing this prob­lem. Despite this fact, the Joint Review Pan­el has instruct­ed those par­tic­i­pat­ing in the hear­ings not to talk about cli­mate change. This is a shock­ing­ly irre­spon­si­ble move con­sid­er­ing Canada’s tar sands con­tain twice the amount of car­bon diox­ide emit­ted by glob­al oil use in our entire his­to­ry. New fos­sil fuel pipelines are an irre­spon­si­ble step in the wrong direc­tion.” said Sean Devlin.

The impacts of cli­mate change have been draw­ing glob­al atten­tion recent­ly, between Hur­ri­cane Sandy, unprece­dent­ed dead­ly typhoons in the Philip­pines and pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­in­able tem­per­a­ture records in Aus­tralia. In this urgent con­text the JRP has des­ig­nat­ed cli­mate change and the car­bon emis­sions of Canada’s tar sands “out­side of the panel’s man­date,” a move that offi­cial­ly dis­cour­ages inter­ven­ers from rais­ing these crit­i­cal issues dur­ing their oral state­ments.

“Enbridge and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment are using their posi­tion of author­i­ty with­in this process to coerce mem­bers of the pub­lic into silence on these issues. The major­i­ty of First Nations and set­tler com­mu­ni­ties in the province oppose fos­sil fuel pipelines. We respect those who are voic­ing their oppo­si­tion to the pipelines inside the hear­ings, but the hear­ing process is mean­ing­less, espe­cial­ly since Harp­er has changed the law, giv­ing his cab­i­net final say on pipeline projects,” said Fiona De Bal­asi Brown.

Today marks the sec­ond day of the Joint Review Pan­el hear­ings in Van­cou­ver and the sec­ond day that the mem­bers of the pub­lic have crossed police lines to make their oppo­si­tion heard. On Mon­day more than a thou­sand pro­test­ers peace­ful­ly forced their way past police onto the Sher­a­ton prop­er­ty drum­ming so loud­ly the noise could be heard inside the hear­ings. Pub­lic out­rage has been embold­ened by a deci­sion to exclude the pub­lic from the hear­ings in Van­cou­ver, a move the BC Civ­il Lib­er­ties Asso­ci­a­tion crit­i­cized yes­ter­day as “poten­tial­ly unlaw­ful.”