Pipelines draw professional protesters The professional protesters were out in force this weekend at Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia. They were trying to stop a pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to the Port of Vancouver that would then load up tanker ships for export. This would be a disaster, the protesters say. Theyre a bit late, though. That pipeline, called Trans Mountain, has been happily pumping away since 1953. According to the port authority, in more than half a century there has never been a navigational incident involving a tanker ship. But thats a trivial detail to the low-information protesters. They only know that they hate fossil fuels, even as they all drive up the mountain, overflowing the parking lot. They even set up a gasoline-powered generator. But the protests arent real. Oh, they look real enough. Over the weekend, 100 angry leftists shouted at police, who finally came in to escort land surveyors, who had to obtain a court order to stop the harassment against them. But the protesters were not deterred by the RCMP or the court order. Some carried signs comparing the Mounties to Nazis; one masked man swore up a blue storm at a female RCMP officer. One Sikh policeman had garbage thrown on him; another cop was spit on. One man violently stormed the line of police. That is the face of the environmentalist movement today. Its un-Canadian. Not just that their tactics are shocking and violent and undemocratic. But that they are literally directed and funded by non-Canadian bosses. All of the leading anti-oilsands groups in Canada are financed, to varying degrees, by foreign interests. Two of the most visible organizers, Tzeporah Berman and Ben West, work for a United States-based lobby group called Forest Ethics, financed by the Tides Foundation. Real Canadians believe in the rule of law, and accepting the result of elections. But American campaign managers have other goals. Its odd, this US-funded war on the oilsands. The Tides Foundation out of San Francisco, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund out of New York - they and a half dozen other foundations have poured tens of millions of dollars into fighting against Canadian resource industries. But never against OPEC or Russian oil, even though they are much larger producers who dont share our ethical values. Thats telling. Its almost like they dont really oppose oil - just our oil. But what these foreign groups lack in democratic legitimacy, they can make up for in money. They flew in Brigette DePape, the rogue Senate page, famous for interrupting Parliament with a Stop Harper! sign. Dan Wallace, another professional protester at Burnaby Mountain, had his calling card too: I totally advocate and stand with anybody that wants to destroy a system thats going to continue oppressing people. I advocate direct violence, direct action - against the cops, he said recently. And of course, the most famous environmentalist-for-hire, David Suzuki himself, made a cameo appearance. The David Suzuki Foundation has taken cash from the Tides Foundation, and runs $9 million a year through their Canadian charitable number. Suzuki had just jetted in from Malaysia, and came to give an anti-capitalist speech, before returning to his $8 million home in Vancouver (he also owns three other properties in the province.) This wasnt a grassroots protest. This was a foreign-funded attack. Joe Oliver had it right - theyre not Canadian, at least not in their values. Theyre foreign radicals. And now theyre ignoring our courts and attacking our police. sunnewsnetwork.ca/archives/sunnews/straighttalk/2014/11/20141125-071520.html
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 14:24:13 +0000
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