GuelphToday received the following letter to the editor from Guelph resident Brian Ostrow on behalf of 350.org Guelph:
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Open letter to Lloyd Longfield MP and Justin Trudeau PM
On July 22, more than forty people met in Guelph to oppose your government’s 4.5 billion dollar buyout of the 60 year old Kinder Morgan pipeline. We are standing together with the hundreds of thousands of people across Canada, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who oppose the expansion not only of another pipeline, but the entire Alberta oil sands project that threatens the health, safety and actual survival of local and distant communities. This reckless growth of an outmoded energy technology, based on mining and burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of climate change, directly affects us all. It is a national, even an international issue.
Mr. Trudeau, you have said many times that “governments grant permits, but communities grant permission”.
• Well, we do NOT give you permission to use taxpayer’s money to bailout out a Texas-based oil company.
• We do NOT give you permission to violate promises made at the Paris Climate Conference to keep global temperature rise below 2°C by 2100.
• We do NOT give you permission to poison and despoil a vast area of Alberta, threatening the health of local communities
• We do NOT give you permission to build a pipeline across unceded First Nations’ territory without their “prior consent”.
• We do NOT give you permission to threaten the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people who live and work around the Burrard Inlet and B.C. coast which will be decimated by the inevitable tanker spill.
• We do NOT give you permission to eliminate an iconic population of killer whales, projected to go extinct with the expected seven-fold increase in tanker traffic.
Mr. Trudeau, your government was elected on promises to take “real action on climate change”. You have said that “you can’t have a strong sustainable economy, without a healthy environment”. Well, you cannot have a strategy to lower greenhouse gas emissions, while expanding production of the dirtiest oil on the planet. A profitable investment in this pipeline depends on global trends in carbon consumption that will destroy human civilization, as we know it. This is NOT how you “create clean jobs, grow our economy and protect our environment”. And you are doing this without consulting the Canadian people, which you promised to do, when elected in 2015 on a platform of “real change”.
Mr Longfield, actions have consequences. As your constituents, we elected you to listen and understand our deep concerns. You may find in the coming election, that you no longer have the support of people in Guelph who care about a future for their children and grandchildren, who want to protect our waters and our air, who want to switch to a clean economy based on green energy, who want justice and reconciliation with our First Nations, who oppose government bailouts to corporations whose primary objective is profit and greed. The purchase of Kinder Morgan is immoral, unsustainable and financially makes no sense. We hope you will change the direction of your government’s climate policy before it is too late.
Signed: 40 citizens of Guelph who Say No to the Kinder Morgan Pipeline buyout, 350.org Guelph, Guelph Citizen’s Climate Lobby
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