Burnaby Mountain protests bear strong similaries to Clayoquot Sound's 'War in the Woods'

There were more arrests Monday at the site of a protest against survey work for Kinder Morgan International’s proposed expansion of its TransMountain pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver to accommodate oil sands bitumen exports.

For a second week, the RCMP began hauling off pipeline opponents who crossed police tape into the off-limits zone in a forested conservation area on Burnaby Mountain in suburban Vancouver.

Kinder Morgan obtained a civil injunction barring protesters from interfering with drilling crews taking samples from the rock for a proposed route of the as-yet unapproved line through the mountain to its export terminal on Burrard Inlet.

But despite the threat of jail for flouting the court order, the arrests continue and numbers at the protest camp are growing, including a 74-year-old grandmother with no previous history of civil disobedience.

With native drumming, face-to-face confrontations with police and dozens of arrests so far, the anti-pipeline protest has a familiar feel to those who witnessed firsthand the bitter War in the Woods in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.

There are distinct parallels, says Valerie Langer, a leader of the massive blockades against clear-cut logging of old-growth rainforest in the Clayoquot Sound region of Vancouver Island.

Every protest movement has its own culture and momentum, said Langer, now on the staff of Forest Ethics, an environmental coalition. But over the last two years, she’s seen the kind of organic growth in the anti-pipeline protest that reminds her of Clayoquot.

“Nobody can actually create this kind of movement,” said Langer, reached by phone Monday on Burnaby Mountain during a visit to support the protest.

“It happens because people get to a point of frustration and there’s a catalytic event or a time that people can galvanize around.”

Opposition to clearcut logging grew despite arrests

Opposition to clearcut logging, especially of ancient rainforest trees, had been building through the 1980s, and Clayoquot Sound was the scene of regular confrontations with crews from B.C. forest giant MacMillan Bloedel, which held the cutting licence for the area.

There was civil disobedience and arrests through the early 1990s, said Langer. But neither government nor industry was willing to consider changes to logging practices until thousands turned up through the summer of ’93, with more than 700 arrested.

“It wasn’t until 1993 that you saw the really big protests,” she told Yahoo Canada News. “By that point people were just ‘what more do we have to do? What more does it take to get the government to act?’

“That’s the sort of feeling I feel in a much more compressed sense with climate change. Every single person that you talk to is concerned about climate change except for a few deluded people who feel it’s not happening.”

Protestors are also concerned about the potential environmental damage a bitumen spill might cause locally. Langer said the 10-day survey project offers a focal point for them and those who see stopping the pipeline as a blow against oilsands development, who’ve felt largely powerless to affect change.

“There are moments and places where the time is just seized and it’s an opportunity to just show up, whether they’re crossing the line [to get arrested] or showing up to support or dropping off Rice Krispie squares to the people holding the camp,” she said. “It’s a way for people to say I feel strongly and I’m going to do something about this.”

Lawyer Greg McDade also sees similarities. He fought the Clayoquot injunction arrests all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada for Greenpeace, which was representing the protesters.

“The interesting thing is both protests sort of expanded over time,” said McDade, whose firm represents the City of Burnaby, which has applied to appeal the original order by the National Energy Board granting Kinder Morgan permission to conduct drilling on city-owned land in the B.C. Court of Appeal and Federal Court.

“They [the Clayoquot protesters] were not a small group of people. They were a large, consistent group of the general public. The court wasn’t dealing with a handful of protesters that once they’re arrested, they’re done.”

There are legal parallels, too, he said. The B.C. Supreme Court judge who granted Kinder Morgan the injunction cited the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling upholding a judge’s power to grant so-called “John Doe” civil injunctions that did not single out individuals but targeted anyone a company might believe was interfering with its rights.

“It was really an order against the world at large,” said McDade.

The principle has come under fire in the legal community, he said, because it turns the court from an arbiter of dispute into a rule-maker coming down one one side against a significant portion of the public.

Someone facing civil contempt could not argue the merit of their protest, only whether or not they’d violated the injunction, which critics see as an infringement on free expression that turns concerned citizens into lawbreakers.

“Some people think that’s unwise,” McDade said.

At least in Clayoquot, MacMillan Bloedel was defending a clear property right, a licence to log on Crown land.

“Here, these protests are taking place on public land, on parkland,” he said McDade. “The only right the company has to be there stems from an order given by the National Energy Board that’s contrary to Burnaby’s bylaws.”

The threat of arrest is not acting as a deterrent on Burnaby Mountain, just as it didn’t in Clayoquot’s towering forests. Perhaps the contrary, said Langer. The Clayoquot blockade, which unlike Burnaby Mountain was a five-hour drive from the nearest town, grew with the number of arrests.

“We never knew from one day to the next who was going to show up and then every day more people showed up,” she said. “I think it’s because it’s the moment and a place.

“It’s like a forum given to that fear about what will happen and the hope that people can actually do something to change it. That’s what Clayoquot was and that’s what this is.”

Protests forcing debate over oilsands’ impact on climate change

Activist Tzeporah Berman, who was also at the centre of the Clayoquot protest, said the profile of the protest and opposition to other oil sands pipelines such as Enbridge Inc.‘s Northern Gateway and TransCanada’s Energy East has helped force the debate over oilsands development further into the mainstream.

Potential opposition to the Energy East project, which would convert and reverse an existing east-to-west line to carry bitumen crude to eastern refineries and export points, has forced new Alberta Premier Jim Prentice to address the greenhouse gas effects of oilsands development, said Berman. The prospect of reduced pipeline capacity has also triggered the delay or cancellation of several planned oilsands projects, she said.

“My sense is that this is the tip of the iceberg, as it was in Clayoquot,” said Langer. “The blockades were a tactic. They morphed into the international market campaigns [to pressure companies not to use old-growth wood], which were part of the War in the Woods, and they grew to include the Great Bear Rainforest [on B.C.’s northwest coast].”

Ultimately, she said, there will be a decision that recognizes oilsands development needs to be scaled back in the interests of slowing climate change.

“At a very minimum, none of these pipelines will ever be built,” said Langer.

Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace activist who now works on sustainability issues for industry, disagreed.

There is no way all the proposed pipelines will be blocked permanently, given the only alternative is moving bitumen by rail tank car, which offers lower capacity and the risk of derailments and spills.

“I believe the pipeline companies have already done everything they could imagine to make the pipes safer,” Moore said via email. “Sustainable pipeline practices are much less complex than sustainable forest practices.

“I can’t see the Conservatives backing down on such a strategically important topic.”