Dear Sir:
Enbridge raises four points in response to my April 11 letter to the editor in The Terrace Standard on the possibility of PetroChina’s building the Northern Gateway pipeline to transport tar sands bitumen to itself: it’s premature, Enbridge would have an open bid process, bidders would have to meet stringent requirements and the company is committed to hiring local people, not foreign workers.
They are wrong on all counts and they missed the point of the letter which was that Canada is losing control of its natural resources as quickly as it can give them away.
This is the very time to talk about every aspect of the pipeline. The federal government is presently shortening the time available for review.
PetroChina’s is a major financial backer of Enbridge for this project and while to say the bidding would be open is technically true, it is disingenuous.
To state the line would be built to stringent standards is to state the obvious but misses the point of whether such standards would be sufficient. They wouldn’t. The letter did not talk about foreign workers and to mention them is simply distracting.
And that’s the point of the Enbridge response: to distract the reader from a government policy that gives away a limited public resource for private and foreign profit instead of for maximum, long-term public good.
Robert Hart, Terrace, BC