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Awareness video tracks pipeline, talks to people

Wednesday video presentation will include speaker from Dogwood Initiative

The Northern Gateway Pipeline Project (in case you have been hiding under a rock for the past few years) is a proposal by Calgary’s Enbridge Corporation to construct a 1,170 kilometer oil pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, B.C.  The pipeline would cross 733 watercourses and bring supertankers to B.C.’s pristine North Coast for the first time ever.

On Nov. 14 Awareness Film Night will be screening the film On The Line.  In the summer of 2010, filmmaker Frank Wolf and his friend Todd McGowan biked, hiked, rafted and kayaked the GPS track of that proposed pipeline. Through the voices of people they meet along the way, their rough and tumble journey reveals the severe risks and consequences associated with this $5.5 billion mega project.

According to an article by Joyce Nelson in the October CCPA Monitor, “on August 26 the Canadian Press reported that the Northern Gateway spill-response plan filed by Enbridge with the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel deals only with conventional oil, not specifically with the dilbit (diluted bitumen) that the proposed pipeline will carry.”  Dilbit is more caustic to pipelines and much more difficult and expensive to clean up than conventional oil spills.  In fact, when an Enbridge pipeline spilled 20,000 barrels of dilbit into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010, officials there soon found out that there is no plan currently developed for cleaning up a dilbit spill and “after 2 years of extensive dredging of the river bed, blobs of bitumen reportedly are still sitting on the bottom of the Kalamazoo.”

Celine Trojand from the Dogwood Initiative, based in Victoria, will be in attendance to lead the post-screening discussion and answer questions about plans for oil and dilbit pipelines in B.C.  Celine grew up in rural North Eastern B.C. and earned a degree in Anthropology from UBC Okanagan.  She began working for the Dogwood in 2009 and is “unfalteringly devoted to building power in communities and empowering individuals” across the province she calls home.

Showtime is 7 p.m. at the Edward Milne Community School theatre.  Admission is by donation.