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Dear Editor:
If the Kinder Morgan pipeline gets expanded, oil tanker traffic will increase by seven times in the waters off Vancouver in the Georgia Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
That beautiful coastal area and its waters will be placed at risk of ruin with pollution in no time at all, even without an oil tanker rupture.
If the pipeline leaks or breaks along its route through the rugged and earthquake prone BC mountains, the damage to the environment will be an unrepairable catastrophe.
But Alberta doesn't give a damn, because it has no environmental risk. Their money-making oil will go into the pipeline in Alberta, travel through mountain ranges, and hopefully come out the other end at Burnaby, B.C. Any oil spill will be somewhere else, but not in Alberta.
It's the same selfish mentality Alberta has with the Tar Sands. The air pollution created by the Tar Sands blows eastward to somewhere else. The pollution of the Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca, again by the Tar Sands, have killed most of the fish and any that are left are covered with scabs and sores. But those waters flow to somewhere else.
On a similar note, Alberta allowed oil drillers to just walk away from tens of thousands of drilling sites across its province leaving the land at those sites polluted and rendered unusable for agriculture, and the local land owners on the hook for any clean-up costs.
It appears that Alberta is being totally self-centered and irresponsible, as usual. Actually immoral.
Robert Hall
Saskatoon