Call for Phone Blitz to BC Cabinet Ministers
– Dogwood Institute –
Police are using bulldozers, helicopters and K9 units to force their way into Wet’suwet’en territory as we speak, arresting elders, Indigenous land defenders and legal observers.
The RCMP flew in two planeloads of officers to clear a path for the Coastal GasLink pipeline project, while people are still missing and 17,000 have been forced from their homes by deadly landslides and flooding.
Cabinet ministers had to have authorized this diversion of public safety resources to Wet’suwet’en territory. (BC Minister Mike Farnworth personally signed off on the last raid in January 2020.)
Call them right now and tell them what you think of using a climate disaster to force a pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.
The government will try to frame this as a humanitarian mission to bring aid to pipeline contractors stuck behind a blockade. In reality, Coastal GasLink was evicted from the territory by all five Wet’suwet’en clans in January 2020. Last week contractors again ignored orders to leave.
Acting BC Premier Mike Farnworth foreshadowed this raid on Monday, [November 15] issuing a press release calling pipeline opponents criminals — while military helicopters plucked stranded families off highways destroyed by nature’s wrath.
The BC NDP government is obsessed with completing the “LNG Canada” fracked gas export project, despite its shaky economics — and the urgent, obvious need to stop expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.
They gave away over $5 billion in tax breaks to convince a consortium of foreign oil companies to build the terminal in Kitimat. They’re on track to give $1.5 billion in subsidies to fracking companies this year, to fill the pipeline with methane.
And they’ve used the RCMP, BC’s provincial police, three times to clear the route and try to speed up construction — ignoring the fact that Wet’suwet’en territory does not and has never belonged to the Crown.
Despite all that, Coastal GasLink is foundering. Tricky engineering, supply chain problems and self-inflicted delays have pushed construction costs higher and higher — to the point where parent company TC Energy threatened to stop building unless investors ponied up billions more. The smart thing to do would be to cancel the pipeline. Instead, the BC NDP government is in a desperate push to make it viable.
Call a cabinet minister right now and tell them to stop using our tax dollars to violate Indigenous rights and force through a climate-wrecking pipeline.
P.S. The BC government has its priorities completely backwards. It should be cancelling fossil fuel expansion and putting public money into disaster relief and prevention. Instead it’s diverting police resources to raid Wet’suwet’en territory, to prop up a fracked gas pipeline. Call a cabinet minister right now and give them hell.
(November 18, 2021)