TransCanada Pushes ahead with Jumbo Pipeline!
Oil Companies launch support Campaign!
The Lubicon Have Not Given Their Agreement!
Public Responds!
This is a direct violation of the Lubicon people's inherint right to this unceded land. An agreement must be reached with the Lubicon before the project is allowed to go ahead.
The Lubicon are in an ongoing battle with the Canadian Government and now TransCanada has interfered. The company is trying to build a 42inch jumbo pipeline directly through unceeded Lubicon territory. The application is going to the Alberta Utilities Commission and has the support of numerous oil companies.
The stakes are so big that the rights of the Lubicons almost seem inconsequential. But human rights are not inconsequential if any of this is to have any meaning and the issue has to be cut somewhere. TransCanada's application to build this pipeline across unceded Lubicon Territory, over the objections of the aboriginal owners of the land, now makes confrontation unavoidable for the Lubicons and a pretty good place to start for everybody else concerned with human rights and the future of the planet.
TransCanada officials have decided that they are not willing to alter their "project timelines" by suspending their Utilities Commission application until they'd answered Lubicon questions and dealt with Lubicon environmental and other concerns.
Repeated Lubicon requests for answers to questions regarding pipeline construction and operation have never been answered by TransCanada despite repeated promises by TransCanada representatives. Worse yet, TransCanada filed the pipeline application accompanied by false public claims that “extensive consultations” had been held and “no objections raised”.
And TransCanada is not alone in the fight for the pipeline construction:
Oil companies including Imperial Oil, Exxon Mobile Canada (EMC), Shell Canada, Suncor, Cargill and Nexen have all requested intervenor status in the Utilities Commission hearing to support TransCanada's North Central Corridor (NCC) pipeline application.
These companies are among the biggest, wealthiest and most politically powerful entities in the world. They are supporting construction of the TransCanada pipeline in order to have access to natural gas to exploit the tar sands until they can convince the public that nuclear power is good for children and other living things. It is clearly their intention to develop nuclear energy plants as a "more appropriate" source of energy to exploit the tar sands (instead of using commercially valuable natural gas). Then they will be able to market the natural gas as well as the tar sands oil -- at least until they render the planet uninhabitable for human life as we know it.
