We’ve Been Busy Creating Victories… (and I almost missed them)
When I left Toronto in November 2015 I was feeling down. During the preceding months I’d been spending much of my time working on Toronto350.org’s community health and administration, and after an internal group conflict over the summer I was feeling emotionally beat. I wrote an article about how I’d realized my travels in Europe had become a “quest for hope”, although I never got around to publishing it. I was drained, tired, and losing hope.
Now that I’ve been away for a few months I’ve been able to step back a little and focus on the things we have accomplished. I had been working in amongst the trees, yet had lost sight of the forest. My last article focused on the successes of the Fossil Fuel Divestment campaign, and as I was writing it I came across some more exciting news: the National Energy Board (NEB) had just ordered TransCanada to re-file its application for the Energy East tar sands pipeline!
Why is this big news? Canada’s 10-year-oily-dictator Stephen Harper had attempted to streamline the NEB pipeline ‘regulatory’ (cough, approval) process. Harper had set an 18-month timeline for NEB regulatory review for pipelines. Since TransCanada (the oil pipeline company) first submitted their application 15 months ago this should have meant that the NEB ‘needed’ to make their decision by May 2016.
Instead, the NEB just sent TransCanada to the drawing board!
This is a major setback for TransCanada, which will delay the process by months! This would not have happened without communities getting in the way, forcing TransCanada to repeatedly change their plans.
For the West Coast pipelines the timelines were much longer than our 18 months, and campaigns against them had enjoyed a decade of consciousness-raising and gathering opposition. For Energy East we were told we only had 18 months. So we got to work.
Last winter Toronto350.org (and many other groups) mobilized to try to leverage a crack we’d perceived in Harper’s regulatory process. The so-called “public participation” now required people to complete a complex application process just to have the chance to say something, and talking about climate change wasn’t allowed. So we decided to get as many people as possible to apply, specifically to talk about the climate. We called it the People’s Climate Intervention.
Across the country we flooded the NEB with applications to intervene based on the forbidden topic of climate. A full 70% of the ~2000 applications the NEB received were climate-related, demonstrating the growing power of the climate movement! Toronto350.org alone managed to mobilize 500 people to submit applications — 25% of the total! Thanks to all the people who took part in this, the NEB has now stressed the importance of public participation moving forward — something they wouldn’t have done without us pressuring them!
We can also thank community power for the changes TransCanada was forced to submit, such as changing the destination port away from Cacouna.
TransCanada has now been given two weeks to come up with just the Table of Contents, and I think we can expect that it’ll take many months for them to revise the hundreds of pages of their application. Additionally, they now have to submit it in English and French — they originally, lazily, only submitted the application in English, and we can thank communities raising their voices in Quebec for forcing this increased demand on TransCanada’s resources!
Without people like us creating an active opposition TransCanada would be putting shovels (well, mega-diggers) in the ground in May 2016. We have set them back by over a year, keeping thousands (millions?) of tons of fossil fuels where they belong — in the ground!
Although this is a victory in the struggle against the fossil fuel system, this is not a final victory. A delay is not a cancellation, which will require us to continue to build our power and increase the pressure. And stopping one pipeline won’t shut down the tar sands — the larger goal that is demanded by justice (and climate science). We still have a lot of work to do. Yet sometimes it’s encouraging to take a moment to reflect on the power we have already built and how far we have already come.
