Up Here Goes Green

For some reason, the glossy rag Up Here Beeswax hired Green Julie to report on the national embarrassment that is also known as the Joint Review Panel (JRP).

The JRP has been tasked with compiling a report on environmental impacts of the proposed Mackenzie Valley Gas Project – a 1,200 km pipeline that will carry gas from Inuvik, NT to Zama City, AB. So far, they are about three-and-a-half years behind schedule.

Green Julie, aside from being the Sierra Club’s bingo caller, sometimes can be heard bemoaning the evils of the “tar” sands on the Communist Broadcasting Corporation.

In the article, The Review That Will Not End, the soy latte-slurping Green wags her finger at everyone she thinks is responsible for the delays to the JRP.

She blames the nasty oil companies, who crumpled under the sheer volume of requests for information by her co-conspirators in their plot to banish industry from the North.

Her primary source in the article is none other than Kevin “Squeaky” O’Reilly – the infamous Capital City eco-thug who did his best to stop the diamond mines and is now looking to throw himself in front of the Mackenzie Valley Gas Project.

Green Julie ignores the fact that aside from the gross incompetence of the panel’s slack-jawed members, the primary reason for this review taking so long is the hundreds of ridiculous “interveners” allowed at the panel hearings. O’Reilly and his ilk heaped so many pages of inane and redundant testimony on the panel, they simply choked.

There are over 100,000 pages of testimony to review from O’Reilly as an individual along with presentations from his allied comrades at Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Alternatives North, Out North, the YWCA and on and on and on.

Any NGO they could think of were thrown onto the agenda of these hearings to derail the proceedings, but Green Julie fails to mention any of that.

“Kevin O’Reilly is sympathetic, saying the panel should take its time to write a thorough report.” Yes, not surprising. Those are almost identical words used by our Member of Parliament, Dennis Bevington, in his own special presentation to the JRP. “Take your time,” the Groucho Marxist urged the panel, as they dozed away in their own drool puddles.

I wonder if the banks are going to say “Take your time,” to contractors who’ve borrowed and made huge investments in this project? I wonder if the shareholders of the energy companies are saying “Take your time, we don’t need a return for a decade or so.”

They’ve taken enough time. Suspend their funding, take what they’ve completed and finish it. The whole JRP idea was a charade from the beginning anyway. Everyone knows the National Energy Board is going to make their own decision. Let’s be realistic. The JRP was only window dressing. No one was going to give the likes of Barry Greenland and Gina Dolphus power to stop a project so important to the country.

That would be as silly as hiring an environmental activist to write for a business magazine.