Kinder Morgan

The incessant grumbling from Canada’s oil industry—on pipelines, environmental reviews, carbon pricing and competitiveness—is obscuring the obvious.

We’re not going to get off fossil fuels overnight!” How many times have you heard that?

The Chiefs of Ontario, representing 133 First Nations across the province, has lent its support to the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion in a May 2 letter of support.

Together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples need to take action, showing their Members of Parliament that there are thousands of people across Canada ready for real climate action.

The Tsleil-Waututh Nation "is of the view that the new evidence, viewed in the larger context of the existing evidence which is already before the Court, casts further unfavorable light on Canada's approach to 'consultation' with TWN," wrote lawyer Scott Smitt in a letter sent to the Federal Court of Appeal on April 29, 2018.

"Would you put your life on the line?" Twenty-year-old Tsleil-Waututh youth leader Cedar George asked Green party MLA Sonia Furstenau, who met with Indigenous activists protesting the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion on Burnaby Mountain on Monday.

If the case launched by First Nations is reopened or appealed, here is a sample of some of the relevant evidence released through access to information legislation and other public information gathered by National Observer over the past two years.

A lawyer representing the Tsleil-Waututh Nation has asked the Federal Court of Appeal to compel the release of the Trudeau government's Trudeau government Kinder Morgan secrets.

Officials have lifted an evacuation order on the city of Superior, Wisconsin where, one day earlier, an explosion at an oil refinery released black clouds of noxious smoke into the air, injuring 20 people and sending the 27,000 residents of the city fleeing. The explosion has residents of Burnaby questioning how our city would handle such a disaster.

“I guess that's something that wouldn't have fazed me at all if the Harper government was still in power,” the public servant told National Observer. “But given the change in government, seeing as how we were told to provide serious advice, I was rather shocked at being given that kind of direction. It's not something that I would have expected from a Liberal government.”

The B.C. government is asking the courts to decide whether the province can legally regulate the transportation of hazardous substances like diluted bitumen through the province.

The job of journalists is not to be popular, or go along to get along, but to pursue facts that matter – then let them fall ‘without fear or favour’. Which brings us to Canada’s bitumen bubble, and missing-in-action media coverage, which amounts to malpractice.

The threat of diluted bitumen spills has been flagged as a major concern by scientists, First Nations and British Columbia. Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna told her provincial B.C. counterpart she has a plan to address this concern.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and NDP MP Guy Caron have fired off a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, urging him to release all of the government's secret cabinet records related to its review of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sidestepped questions raised in the House of Commons on Tuesday about secret instructions delivered in 2016 to public servants working on the federal review of the Trans Mountain expansion project.