Prime Minister will meet with the Canadian Coast Guard in Victoria on April 5, 2018. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press). Photo courtesy of CBC.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will travel to Victoria for an afternoon trip on Thursday.
He will be meeting with Canadian Coast Guard workers at 25 Huron Street for an announcement on marine safety and oil spill prevention.
Before his meeting in Victoria at 2:35 p.m., Trudeau will be in Québec City to deliver remarks at the Business 7 Summit.
Trudeau’s itinerary says after the Prime Minister’s visit with the Canadian Coast Guard, he will then go to Vancouver for a clean-technology roundtable at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel. There will be a $1,000-a-plate Liberal party fundraiser in the evening.
Several hundred, possibly thousands, of Trans Mountain pipeline protestors plan to show up at the Vancouver fundraiser Thursday evening. pans with wooden spoons to make as much noise as possible.
The Trans Mountain pipeline was approved by the Trudeau government in 2016 but protesters say it will raise the risk of oil spills in the Burrard Inlet and can’t be completed if the government is to meet its climate change commitments to cut Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions another 200 million tonnes a year by 2030.
Furor over the pipeline has ramped up in recent weeks, with around 200 people arrested near Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby, B.C. marine terminal in the last month; Trudeau faced protesters at a town hall in Nanaimo in February and their ranks have grown in the days since.
“Our warning to the prime minister and to his wealthy donors is that building this pipeline is going to cost him in the next election,” said Jolan Bailey, a climate campaigner with Leadnow.
He said the protest in Vancouver has only been planned for a week but already 2,700 people have expressed an interest in the event and 700 say they plan to attend.
On his western Canadian trip, Trudeau won’t be sitting down with B.C. Premier John Horgan, whose government opposes the pipeline and has tried to put stumbling blocks in the way of construction.
Trudeau has said several times that getting environmental protections in place hinges on also getting resources safely to overseas markets. That requires pipelines.
As such, after pushing clean technology and oil spill protection in B.C. on Thursday, Trudeau is to fly to Fort McMurray, Alta., for a tour of Suncor’s new oilsands facility there, and a meeting with oil company executives.
The oil industry has been critical of the government for putting regulatory barriers to more development. Trans Canada Corp. last year blamed the demise of the proposed Energy East pipeline project on the government changing the rules for pipeline approvals.
The Liberals recently introduced new environmental assessment legislation in a bid to prove it’s possible to better balance the needs of the environment with the needs of the oil industry.
That legislation, however, may allow oilsands developments to opt out of federal environment reviews, which Emma Pullman called ridiculous. Pullman, the campaign manager for advocacy group Sum of Us, said you can’t be a climate leader and build more pipelines.
Pullman understands the political quagmire Trudeau is in between the environment in B.C. and fossil fuel backers in Alberta but she said there are 18 Liberal MPs from British Columbia, all of whom could be at risk in the next election if the pipeline goes ahead. The Liberals have only four seats in Alberta.
“I hear the challenge of that but I don’t know how you build that pipeline and meet our climate goals,” said Pullman.
CHEK News will have coverage of Trudeau’s visit with the Canadian Coast Guard online and during our broadcasts at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. PST.
With files from Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press
CHEK News
