Approaching
the huge, towering Wall Centre complex where the hearings are being held (at what
huge, towering cost to us taxpayers?), I was first amazed at the dozen or more very
well-protected police patrolling outside . . . and even more amazed at the
dozen or so inside the lobby and then even more amazed at the police posted in the halls outside the hearing
rooms.
Each of us speakers was allowed to bring exactly one other
person who would be allowed to sit in a separate room and watch on a video
monitor. No one else was allowed in. And, to speak, we had to sign
up months and months ago . . . The public viewing of the hearing
was only through a video monitor located about a mile away in another
enormously expensive glitzy hotel.
Second, in addition to the large security presence, I was amazed
at the very many people employed to run the hearing. It was all very
tightly organized with several dozen people to sign us in, take an affidavit
under oath, give us name tags, check our coats and bags, watch over us, keep us seated in the waiting
room, watch over the people watching over us, escort us at the right time from the waiting room to the hearing room,
watch the people escorting us, place an absolutely clean water glass on the table before us, record what we
said, transcribe overnight the oral recording into a written record, escort us back out again, be sure we left and who knows what else . . .
All this is going on for hours and hours a day, day after day,
as hundreds and hundreds of us come to give our testimony.
If only half as
much attention and resources were devoted to taking care of the environment and to needy people among us as to making sure that the hearings ran smoothly . . .
After working at the First United Church’s homeless shelter and seeing staff laid off and desperately needed programs shut down
because of government funding cuts and knowing about so many other human needs going
unaddressed, I am shocked at how we allow so much money to be poured into the finery
of running these hearing in one of the most expensive venues in Vancouver
instead of a regular government office building’s hearing room or even a school
auditorium or possibly even renting space at one of the many organizations
which could use the income from the rental. The priorities are all so
crazy. Who is this government serving?
The people speaking tonight were very, very impressive.
There were environmental scientists, biologists, journalists, folks who love
the outdoors, teachers, professors, activists . . . and even a rabbi.
The speaker after me was Nicholas Read, one of my
hero-journalists whose stuff I was grateful to read in the Vancouver Sun
for years. (He’s now teaching journalism and appearing in the Sun only
in letters to the editor.) Nicholas gave an impassioned and well-informed
plea to stop the destruction the pipeline would inevitably bring.
The speaker after him was a very impressive biologist named Stan
Proboszcz who was a researcher for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans and
quit because the environmental impact assessment process is so corrupt he couldn't stand being part of it. He now works for an environmental NGO. He gave an exceptionally
well-documented testimony about how the entire process of environmental
assessments done by contract for the companies wanting to do the development is
skewed, flawed, prejudiced and corrupt. You should hear or read his comments.
Just listening to him, I learned a lot and shifted my understanding, sadly, to
be even more cynical about the entire process of corporations engaging the
public around environmental issues.
I think the panel liked what I said – the midrash about God
saying to Adam that ‘if you ruin it, there is no one after you to repair
it’. They smiled when I said it. I briefly made points about the
inevitability of catastrophic oil spills and the pollution and global warming
impacts of the entire tar sands project. I was very brief, just two or
three minutes. I’m sure they liked that too.
The two brilliant speakers after me, Nicholas and Stan, were
only two of hundreds and hundreds of passionate, caring, knowledgeable people
to address this panel in a hugely elaborate, well-designed public hearing
process that is taking months and costing God-only-knows how many millions of
taxpayer dollars.
And the result?
In the end, the panel will write a report and submit it to the
Harper government whose base and home territory is the Alberta oil patch and
who on many, many occasions has totally bulldozed right over public opinion to
do whatever it wants to do. Is the outcome anything but a foregone
conclusion?
Is this effort futile? No way! I have very strong
faith that this hugely destructive project is not going to go ahead in the end despite the hugely
powerful forces behind it.
To quote Rebbe Nahman: All of this world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing to recall is not to fear at all.
To read the transcripts of the hearings, see http://gatewaypanel.review-examen.gc.ca/clf-nsi/prtcptngprcss/hrng-eng.html#s2.
David
