Canada

Several speakers. Ex Federal Environment Minister David Anderson, Dogwood Kai Nagata, a local councillor, a First Nations speaker and a Dogwood organizer. They are optimistic that its a dead deal because there is so much opposition in BC. David Anderson talked about how expensive the tar sands oil is to produce, where the prices have to be around $100 a barrel in order to afford to even extract the stuff, and Iraq can produce better oil for $5 a barrel. Other things he said: there is no signed agreement with China or any other country to buy the stuff, Enbridge and the gov't is just assuming that if they get it to Kitimat it the Chinese will take it. He also said that China is busy buying up all the oil from Africa and I forget where else. That there were 10-12 companies that each chipped in around 10 million dollars apiece with Enbridge to see if they could make this thing happen and that the government won't say who they are, citing corporate privacy or some such crap.

He talked about how flawed the review panel process was, and that they didn't look at all at the corporate culture of Enbridge and they totally disregarded the American panel finding of Enbridge to be as stupid as Keystone cops over the Kalamazoo spill and that Enbridge has not changed anything in spite of how badly they handled that. Kai Nagata talked about the referendum in Kitimat and how that knocked the stuffing out of Enbridge and Harper as they were expecting a nice PR boost from it. He said even he was surprised at how passionate the people in Kitimat were about the issue and how they made fun of the Enbridge brigade touring around in their black SUV's.

The FN rep talked about how they took the reserve to $0 hydro bill with solar energy and how everyone can learn from their process. He also said that Hydro has this deal where they finance $20,000 worth of solar and wind energy and you pay it back with the value of what you put back into the grid. I really hope I didn't misunderstand that part.

Dogwood is pre-organizing the province for either an initiative and referendum like we did with the HST, or prepping for the upcoming federal election whichever comes along first.

I left there feeling pretty good about it all.