Setting aside the environmental risk... there is a Canadian economic question that should be answered and is not covered in the scope of these hearings.

Energy and the cost of it is the single largest economic advantage a country can have. Its a huge multiplier of human labor.

So why then would we export away our cost advantage that sustains our productivity, which sustains our quality of life.

International finance for the most part owns our oil and gas industry in Canada. They harvest the resources with no loyalty to competitive Canadian productivity... they are concerned with profits, the vast majority of profits going offshore.

The purpose of a pipeline like this is to remove Canada from a self contained market, to an internationally priced market. Internationally priced means no energy advantage for Canada and Canadians. We pay what the Chinese are willing to pay negating any energy advantage, so that the Chinese can compete with us on labor alone. Meanwhile the windfall profits from international market pricing go straight to the offshore accounts of our oil industry. Its this kind of conniving abuse (border line treasonous) that should led to the whole oil and gas industry being nationalized.

Furthermore when one considers that it is Petro China that paid the $100 million to get Gateway through the regulatory process... and one looks at the results of their latest spill in China as per the link below... this is what the environmental risk they are selling us... and in addition to the productivity cost we will saddle future generations with.

It is asinine how anyone that cares for their country both physically and economically could support this project.

http://www.rense.com/OilDisasterChina.html

When the other side of this pipelines destination looks like this... they say we are supposed to take the word of the front men selling this project?

What comes to mind when I see those photo's is that guy that killed the 100 dogs in Whistler... after killing a dozen dogs he knew what he was doing was wrong... but he had 88 more dogs to kill... knowing what he was doing was wrong... as do they those people in these photo's and the apologists for the oil industry in disasters like this one.

what would we do with all this energy? Much of the economic growth we have seen over the last 20 years can be attributed to the exporting of energy. Trade makes us grow. There are some great profs at UNBC and CNC that could better explain it and provide some data.

Eagleone:-"So why then would we export away our cost advantage that sustains our productivity, which sustains our quality of life?"
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This is an excellent question, Eagle. Unfortunately, we have to dig into that confusing territory between 'morals' and 'economics' to ever find the answer.

And most people don't want to go there. There scared witless of what such digging might find. Because it might be something that challenges them to 'think'. And it is truly amazing how so many are so certain that 'thinking' is a fate worse than the agonizing death some of those sled dogs faced when the bullets didn't immediately hit home.

We DO have an 'energy advantage'. A huge one. It has allowed us, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a couple of hundred years ago, to progressively overcome what had plagued most of the world for at least a couple of thousand years previously. Scarcity.

Not of resources, but of a way to convert them from the state in which they were found in nature to a state that could serve our needs. A way to 'produce' something from them ~ for all physically productive processes involve the application of 'energy'.

Limited as they previously were to primarily 'muscle power', either from man or animal, 'production' itself was severely limited. There is little opportunity to multiply the amount of energy available only from the muscles of either man or beast.

And so, St. Paul's famous 'moral' dictum from 1st Century Biblical times to, "...let none amongst ye eat until he has first worked", had great meaning. It was a 'moral' as well as an 'economic' truth.

For if EVERYONE didn't 'work', actual starvation ~ famine~ was a very real possibility, and the whole 'moral' structure of society could collapse as the hungry preyed on one another for food to relieve their 'economic' deprivation.

But that was then, and this is now. And far from a situation where EVERYONE must be "harnessed to the plow", we've evolved to a condition where 'scarcity' in physical terms has not only been abolished, but where getting rid of a 'glut' of product after product ~ somewhere, anywhere, (except here, unless someone has first worked to add further to that glut) ~ is our largest problem. All because we have learned, and are still learning, to harness sources of 'energy' beyond what we ourselves can physically exert.

We've solved the PRODUCTION problem, in other words, long ago. And, through science and technology we can expand the possibilities further, far beyond what we can currently imagine.

What we haven't solved, however, is the DISTRIBUTION problem. For here we are still hopelessly mired back in the 1st Century, where we've convinced ourselves that we must never "..let none amongst ye eat until he has first worked," lest the whole structure of society collapse.

Not from scarcity of product anymore though. But from scarcity of 'money'. Money that can't be paid to those who "have not worked" ~ even though, increasingly, their continued work is more a detriment to the well being of society than an asset to it. For it only adds to the 'glut' we have to get rid of. The one WE can't let THEM have (here) unless THEY add further to it.

It is truly amazing to me how we will go to the most perverse end possible to deny this FACT.

We will waste our heritage of resources to try to make everything as labor intensive as possible, simply to try to justify paying someone an income in money by making him 'work' for it, whether his work is needed or not.

If it isn't, we'll go to still greater ends to make work. We'll pretend that it's more cost effective to haul raw materials half way around the world, and bring finished products half way back again for sale, and that somehow all this needless expenditure of energy is justified. It's cheaper, we tell ourselves. How can it be? Because it makes a flawed system of numbers with "$" in front of them seem as if they have meaning?

And then, we'll even 'employ' Environmental Activists ~ that's a whole new field of endeavour in itself, and a lucrative one ~ to protest our 'wasteful' ways. But not in a manner that's ever meaningful, just in ways that'll cause us to do more work, in some manner or another, and get still less again in "$" for it. Through paying a Carbon Tax, perhaps, or some other equally inane exaction to "save the World."

Not only do we fear the thoughts of rising leisure, we move to increasingly make all people work longer, and work ever more "under control." We ignore the FACT that virtually every labor saving invention ever developed was the result of someone having 'leisure' ~ free time to think, and develop it.

Instead, we pontificate how the whole of society would go to complete wrack and ruin if EVERYONE ~ save those few who deem themselves singularly fit to be amongst our 'controllers' ~ wasn't kept perpetually 'employed' and given no time to think for themselves.

No, Eagle. It won't help to 'nationalise' our oil industry. The answer won't be found there. It lies elsewhere, in properly relating the 'real credit' of society ~ a correct estimate of our capacity to produce and deliver goods and services, as when, and where required, by US, with 'financial credit'. The means of DISTRIBUTION in our modern, ever more productive world.

WOW, if you don't read that carefully it almost makes sense.

Read it carefully then, hood rich. And find where it DOESN'T make sense.

I think it makes far more sense than, say, having every politician in every Party nattering continuously about creating "jobs", while every business, as a matter of 'financial' necessity, is trying its hardest to reduce its costs by eliminating them.

No I refuse to read it again. Makes me laugh too hard. I have work to do.

Hood, when you are done laughing realize that all of the economic growth you mentioned from the oil and gas industry was for export to the US... an economy we are tied to that has similar standard of living as our, similar environmental laws, similar labor compensation and laws. In essence its a closed economy with our on the energy distribution, which allows all to operate under the same rules give or take a small deviation.

China however is an entirely different matter. They under cut our markets on the environmental considerations (see photo's above), they under cut us on currency manipulation, they under cut most importantly in how they treat their slave labor... then they sell into our markets displacing our industry (free trade) with these advantages that are manufactured through depression of their own people... the only competitive advantage our society has left is the advantage of a cheaper cost to our energy resources in which we can multiply our productivity to make up for our loses to the Chinese sweat labor.

This is a fact that only a laughing fool could miss.

So what do we do... we allow the international financial sector take our resources to the global market so as to eliminate our one advantage we have left... to subsidize their operations in China that take the totalitarian advantage of a slave people to increase their profits and dominance over our society and our internal markets.

This pipeline is akin to them to winning a war without a bullet being fired. Guys like our former mayor are their best assets in this war. Its a way to stranglehold our economy to their new reality... perversely in the name of jobs, productivity, and economic gain... of which all are just a mirage in an expanding dessert of devastation to our societies ability to compete and maintain our standard of living.

This is to say nothing of the windfall profits to the financiers we will all pay as our energy costs are increasing pegged to the international willingness to pay.

Something I wish the politicians supporting this would think about.

Look the Chinese have no qualms about restricting our access to the rare earth minerals in order to increase their productivity unfairly against ours in using their currency and controlled slave labor market conditions to first shut our rare earth industry down, and then use further manipulation via restriction of exports to capture the new economic industries tied to rare earths like the green technologies, computers, ect... to essentially rob us of our future industries... they do it to us to increase their economic advantage over us.

I'm all for selling them wood, paper, manufactured products, minerals and what have you... but energy is special due to its economic multiplier effect and that is essential that our politicians realize this or we are all doomed... my generation will have nothing left but sweat labor in their future and we can blame the laughing fools who gave away our economic advantage for that.