Pipeline protesters promise ‘forceful’ action against construction
Posted June 19, 2019 7:02 am.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Angry protesters marched on downtown Vancouver late Tuesday after the federal re-approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, promising the fight against the project is far from over.
“Protests are going to happen, they are going to get more forceful, they are going to get larger. It is not going to get built,” vowed one demonstrator, part of a loud crowd near the intersection of Georgia and Hamilton Streets.
“A lot of groups in British Columbia have vowed, no matter what, to stop the Trans Mountain Pipeline,” says Roberta Rice, co-editor of Protest and Democracy and a political science professor at the University of Calgary.
“It has become this symbol, a line in the sand for many, and whenever protests come down to a symbolic target it gets very heated and very emotional.”
Rice suggests the demonstrations in B.C. are part of a larger picture, as climate change increasingly becomes a lightning rod issue around the world.
“It seems to be the new protest wave — climate strikes, climate emergencies — and it will be the next big thing to rock Canada,” she tells NEWS 1130. “The book I just published looks at the 2011 protests, the Arab Spring, the Chilean Winter, the Occupy movement, and analysts said that was the most important protest cycle since the 1960s,” Rice explains. “What we are seeing now is a wave that could potentially become another protest cycle around the climate crisis.”
She points to the Extinction Rebellion, which started in the United Kingdom but has begun to move across borders.
“It could potentially come to Canada and bring together all these different groups, students, Indigenous protesters, environmentalists, and if they could somehow cohere into a single, more meaningful framework, that could be very, very powerful.”
But whether on the left or the right, Rice says protest is good for democracy.
“It holds governments to account, it gives them new ideas and it sheds light on what society cares about. In the absence of protest, we would have a very superficial democracy. It really is its life blood.”
Work on twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline between Alberta’s oilsands and Burrard Inlet is poised to resume in the months ahead.
As of Wednesday morning, there was no sign of demonstrators at sites previously occupied on Burnaby Mountain.
