Harper and Enbridge Face First Nations Resistance
It’s 2007 and we’ve been running our No Tanker campaign for a couple years. Our Oil Tankers are Loonie campaign had gone viral attracting press and supporters from around the world, but we’d never met with Enbridge. So there I am, dressed in my only suit, accompanied by a few colleagues finally meeting with the Enbridge CEO and his senior staff in a conference room in the Bentall Tower in Downtown Vancouver.
The meeting was cordial – Patrick Daniel is a charming man and he attempted to assure us that he was on the side of angels by being concerned about global poverty. The initiative he was most proud of was the energy4everyone foundation he had set up to help disadvantaged communities in Africa. We told him we shared his concerns for the world’s disadvantaged, but didn’t think the best way to improve their circumstances was to take some of the world’s dirtiest oil, jam a pipeline through unceded First Nations lands, ship it across a thousand streams and put it on oil tankers bigger than the Exxon Valdez for shipment through some of the most dangerous waters for ships – let alone massive tankers.
After sharing stories about working in the developing world, Patrick Daniel assured us Enbridge would only operate in communities where it was welcome. We were happy to hear this, but rightly took it as a rhetorical comment – not as an enforceable commitment.