Dear Editor:
The Trans Mountain expansion pipeline cost keeps climbing; $30.9 billion is the projected cost, but who knows how high it will climb. The price tag was $21.4 billion in 2022. What a hike from the earlier projected price of $12.6 billion. The cost had originally been $4.5 billion!
According to our Crown corporation, the cost is affected by flooding, inflation, archeological finds, difficult geography, and supply chain problems. They are straightforward problems that should have been identified and factored into the real price of this ill gotten fiasco in the first place.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that we will lose money from this investment, and if we cancel, we would lose more than $14 billion in assets. That is a powerful statement, but if we go ahead we will probably pay plenty, maybe much, much more cleaning up future spills, fixing production failures and cleaning up the sea when inevitable accidents happen.
We have always been known as a clean country with unbelievable natural landscapes and pristine waters. Have you seen photos of the destruction the pipeline has caused? And the project is going forward in spite of so many warnings about this risky, dangerously polluting project.
We have pledged over and over to clean up Canada’s act. We made pacts with the global community to work towards carbon neutrality. But contrary to that, we move ahead as if Canada’s word counted for nothing!
Trans Mountain Corporation said recently that construction of the project is nearly 80 per cent complete. It expects the pipeline will be in service in 2024.
The official strategy is for the country to be able to get more oil to port to allow us to ship to the world, to get full market price for the oil. But is this the way we want to be seen by the global community, remembered in history books as one of the countries that held out and kept producing deadly sources of pollution and shipping them to other countries?
Will we be denounced in the future for helping to lead the planet into the era of species extinction, unsupportable destruction of the land, water and air, while touting ourselves as some kind of leader in reducing carbon?
Gerry Walsh,
Erin