We can’t eat crude.
Today (June 8th) is World Ocean’s Day. And next Sunday is Canadian Rivers Day (June 12th). In celebration of World Oceans Day and Canadian Rivers Day, and West Coast Environmental Law’s decades-long campaign to protect the off-shore waters of British Columbia, we are launching a social media fundraising campaign. Starting today, through Sunday, West Coast Environmental Law is raising funds to help our ongoing work to prevent supertankers, and the pipelines to feed them, from sailing BC’s treacherous Northwest Coast. Please support us – we’re trying to raise $5000 in the coming days (and if you miss the campaign period, it’s never too late to donate).
Our current work to prevent the Enbridge Pipeline, and to get recognition in Canadian Law of the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic that exists in Indigenous law, is crucial to protecting BC’s rivers and ocean from the risk of oil spills. Read more about it here.
But West Coast is not new to the job of protecting BC’s oceans and rivers from pollution. Here’s just a few of our accomplishments related to oceans during our 35 year history:
- Over the years our Environmental Dispute Resolution Fund has given Oceans advocates the tools they need to protect our ocean environment, from helping fund Alexandra Morton in her successful constitutional challenge of BC’s fish farm laws (2009) to getting the Living Oceans Society a legal opinion that it used to help persuade the BC government to pay to recover sunken vehicles, containing 10,000 litres of diesel fuel from the ecologically sensitive Robson Bight (2008).
- In 2002 we published Cruise Control, our comparison of the laws governing pollution from cruise ships in many different jurisdictions, which called for stronger Canadian laws regulating the cruise ship industry.
- In 1996, Parliament adopted Bill C-98, the Oceans Act. West Coast was successful in pressing for the Act to adopt principles based on sustainable development and the precautionary approach, as well as requiring mandatory implementation of plans for integrated coastal zone management. This strengthened Oceans Act continues to protect Canada’s oceans.
- Beginning in 1988 we helped coordinate public opposition to toxic organochlorines in BC’s waters from the pulp and paper industry. Over forty organizations with a combined membership of over 200,000 join. In 1992 the BC government introduced new pulp mill regulations requiring all pulp mills in the province to eliminate organochlorines by December 31, 2002. While the BC government ultimately relaxed these regulations in 2001, even the relaxed standards limited organochlorine emissions to levels of industry had previously insisted were unachievable. Those who remember the wide-spread shell-fish closures due to dioxin contamination will know the significance of West Coast’s achievements on this file.
- In the early 1980s we were active in opposition industry proposals to lift the moratorium on oil and gas exploration off BC’s coast. In 1981 and 1982, we presented briefs to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on National Resources and Public Works, calling for a legislated ban on offshore exploration, and demanded a full public inquiry before the government consider allowing exploration and drilling.
- Subsequently, the province and federal government established a joint public inquiry, which recommended that offshore exploration and drilling should not proceed unless 92 specific recommendations were implemented.
- In 1980 we coordinated the Fraser River Estuary Forum, a joint federal/provincial task force formed to resolve land-use conflicts along the Fraser River.
- In the late 1970s West Coast was active in the West Coast Oil Ports Inquiry – a commission set up by the government to examine a proposal, very similar to Enbridge’s current proposal, to build an oil port at Kitimat, BC. The Inquiry concluded that the risks of tankers were not manageable and the proposal was shelved.
We think that our current efforts to protect BC’s coast from oil spills are pretty cool. We hope you do too.
But I also hope you will give us a World Ocean’s Day donation for our decades worth of work to protect our province’s coast from other sources of pollution.
