In our special arrangements segment, the leader of BC Green Party writes for the Sher-e-Punjab Radio AM 600, taking a deep dive into Alberta and Ottawa's pipeline project. 

By Emily Lowan, Leader of BC Green Party

Working families are facing a cost of living, healthcare, and housing crisis: a pipeline solves none of these problems. Rather than making life easier for British Columbians, Prime Minister Carney is powering Premier Smith’s efforts to delay the swan song of her most reliable donors, oil lobbyists. This pipeline will be fueled by the tax dollars of working people who will see none of its benefits. Workers will face the threat of oil spills and devastation to Northern and Coastal First Nations’ livelihoods. Benefits are, instead, reserved for the billionaire-class who have spent decades sinking their claws into Canada’s oil industry.

Canadians need a secure economy, not the rollercoaster of skyrocketing prices that comes from our ties to the United States. Carney and Smith are utilizing this moment of profound instability to sell a pipeline as a panacea for this issue, when in reality, a pipeline will keep us shackled to an unstable resource, and to the United States. This is illustrated nowhere more clearly than Trump and Israel’s war on Iran: British Columbians are feeling the acute
effects of an oil economy through price shocks and a downward spiral of profiteering from fossil fuel corporations.
The rest of the world has acknowledged this reality. Chinese solar exports have doubled their record high in recent months, with their oil imports reaching a plateau. 

The EU — an organization that Carney himself claimed would dictate the new international order — produced more power from renewable energy than from fossil fuels last year. Our own renewable grid can be paid for by taxing the $90 billion in windfall profits Canadian fossil fuel corporations are expected to receive this year.
By putting Danielle Smith and the oil industry first, to the point of giving massive corporate handouts through cutting the industrial carbon tax rate, Carney has signalled with whom his allegiances lie: the corporate class, not working Canadians.
Families are not seeing a government that’s looking out for them, they’re not seeing their bills come down or their lives get easier. They are seeing the last gasp of an industry that knows its time is up.