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off. So, here is this little case study. It’s of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which
is a pipeline that goes between two… which is planned… There is a small one
now. There is an idea to expand it significantly from the oil producing province
of Alberta through to tidewater in Vancouver. That red line shows you where it
goes. It doesn’t matter what the places are. And that pipeline is critical for
Alberta, which is a problem, so much I once lived. Because without it, now the
environmentalists have spoken up against the pipeline to go to the eastern
coast. Up to the north western coast, there’s been a pipeline cancelled.
If without that pipeline, Alberta is in danger of not being able to make enough
money by selling enough oil to keep its now increasing welfare state going.
It at all depends now on having a pipeline to the south and being dependent
on the United States, which as you know, one of the fundamental principles of
sufficiency economy is to not increase dependency but rather decrease it.
So it’s not just the… Right. recently there was a court case in Canada,
where the Federal Court ruled that the pipeline could not go through, after
environmentalists have sent a paper testing it, and after a number of Aboriginal
peoples have sent paper testing it. Not all, some are in favor of it, in fact.
But after the number of protests, the court said they cannot go through for two
reasons:
One, there is not enough consultation with Aboriginal peoples.
Two, it could cause a problem for whales because once you get the oil
to the tidewater, you have to put it on tankers and they cause problems for
mammals. So, what this little case study shows to me is that: first of all,
democracy is a very complex matter. It’s not just a matter of people voting for
something. It’s very complex. There are many different actors, both in making
decisions and influencing decisions. In this case, you had two provinces battling
against each other. Ironically, both of them run by the same kind of
government. They had the same party in power, both Alberta and BC, recently.
But, BC or British Columbia, on the one hand, which is where I come from,
now Vancouver. The environmentalists were strongly opposed to the pipeline,
whereas people in Alberta, very, very few environmentalists in Alberta because
they want to get that oil out so they can have money so they can build their
0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT kinds, including about a hundred Aboriginal people. So on the one hand, we can
own welfare state.
And then, there is government courts and there’s influences of various
see that this case, to me, reveals that the democracy is complex, but it also
reveals that the problem is at the welfare state like Alberta, that just became a
welfare state in 2015. If you want to call it in terms of political parties, that
political party that now runs the province is Social Democratic Party that
