The Line 9 connection to energy security and sustainability

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AppId is over the quota

Activists and protests shook up the usually staid proceedings of the National Energy Board in Montreal and Toronto this month when the regulatory body and the battery of oil industry lawyers that follow it met to deal with Enbridge's proposal to reverse "Line 9B."

The trade union representatives connected to the hearing, myself included, had very mixed feelings about the protests. I could not help but be pleased that the NEB was forced to deal with an engaged public response, because there could not be a more remote regulatory body, hand picked by a government that is little more than a shill for the oil industry. The protests, of course, are in part the result of the Conservative government's new rules that exclude the democratic participation of many groups and individuals from the NEB process because they are seen as radicals delaying energy development.

I wished that there was this kind of activist response to the many NEB pipeline hearings in the past where Unifor's predecessor, CEP, and the Alberta Federation of Labour largely stood alone connecting giant bitumen export pipelines to an unsustainable model of development that does not meet Canada's public interest.

But the irony in Montreal and Toronto is that in this particular instance, I gave evidence to the NEB in support of the reversal of 9B, which will take crude oil from Westover, Ontario to Montreal. Line 9A from Sarnia to Westover was approved last summer. The evidence I gave on behalf of my union was based on the same analysis and argument as for our strong opposition to five previous pipeline projects: Keystone 1, Alberta Clipper, Southern Lights, Keystone XL and Northern Gateway.

For many activists in Toronto and Montreal, Line 9 represents "tar sands oil" coming through local communities and opposing Line 9 is their way of campaigning against the climate change and environmental impacts of the tar sands.

After seven years of fighting the unsustainable development model in the "bitumen sands," Unifor and the Alberta Federation of Labour came to a different conclusion about this project. Our conclusion is different because this project connects to a different model and is different in several ways.

Unlike Keystone XL, Northern Gateway and the others, Line 9 is not an export pipeline and it ends in Montreal. It could be converted to an export line in the future, but there is no current proposal for that. Moreover, it is not the size of a typical export pipe, less than a third of the volume of KXL, and less than half the volume of Gateway. Line 9 is instead import substitution and will displace imported crude oil at Quebec's refineries. It will provide about 75 per cent of the current capacity of those two refineries.

That is why energy workers see Line 9 not as part of the export model but as part of an east-west, Canadian energy security model where we process our resources to meet our own needs.

Line 9 does not by itself represent a sustainable Canadian energy strategy. But it connects to this strategy and secures enhanced job security for thousands of refinery and energy workers who are an essential part of meeting our energy needs.

We also see Line 9 differently in terms of environmental sustainability and climate change. The Line 9 reversal is not one of the giant export pipes that is driving the unsustainable pace of development taking bitumen sands production from less than 2 million barrels per day to over 5 million barrels per day over the next 25 years. There is no doubt that such a trajectory would make any meaningful climate policy impossible and would result in the near complete moonscaping of northern Alberta and much of Saskatchewan.

But how to reverse that unsustainable path, which is already well on course with approved projects and massive capital investment committed? There is no way to change the model without a national energy strategy that makes development serve the public interest and reduces GHGs.

Through its counsel, Steven Shrybman, the union told the NEB last week that this strategy has three pillars:

- Canadian energy security to meet our own needs and to take responsibility for our total GHG emissions.

- Jobs and value added production instead of a policy of exporting ever greater volumes of raw bitumen.

- Sustainability to make all production meet mandatory GHG reduction targets.

Sustainability also includes addressing the legitimate concerns of First Nations before proceeding with energy and pipeline development, and it means tough regulatory measures to force pipeline companies like Enbridge to better protect workers and communities from spills and accidents. This is particularly important for Line 9 which is a 40-year-old infrastructure already existing near sensitive rural and urban environments and which must be upgraded to meet the highest standards of process safety. On this score, the City of Toronto, the Ontario Conservation Authority, community groups and the union spoke with one voice at the Toronto hearings.

One key part of building a Canadian energy strategy to accomplish these goals involves bringing our own resources to Eastern Canada which presently imports 60 per cent to 80 per cent of its crude oil needs -- brought by oil tankers and now transported by rail car from the U.S. At the same time we must transition to a more sustainable energy path, substituting less carbon intensive fuels and renewables and putting in place just transition measures for affected workers and communities.

In an economy as dependent on fossil fuels as ours, achieving these goals is complex and the struggle is full of contradictions. For example, Line 9 provides a route for Canadian crude oil to get to Montreal, but now we learn that a significant part of the crude, at least in the short term, will come from the American Bakken shale oil deposits in North Dakota and Montana. Bakken oil is continentalism turned on its head and undermining Canadian energy security.

It is also the oil version of the new natural gas trend of replacing our own Canadian gas with cheap fracked gas from the U.S. The dramatic stand off over fracking at Elsipogtog, New Brunswick, has focused a new and perhaps larger energy policy challenge that will also be key to a sustainable energy path for Canada and justice for First Nations.

The Line 9 hearings last week could not but bring back memories of past fights before the NEB where we were told repeatedly that jobs and environmental issues were "irrelevant" to NEB decisions. We have yet to score a win with the NEB or the federal government for a sustainable Canadian energy policy, and I would not argue that approval of 9B should be taken as that victory.

But neither will fighting every barrel of oil, wherever its is from or wherever it is going, and by every dangerous mode of transport from pipelines to rail cars to oil tankers, bring us towards sustainability. Simply opposing energy projects, from pipelines to wind farms, has not addressed our insatiable demand for energy nor the over-arching crisis of climate change. The latest report of the IPCC on global climate change, and the knowledge that Canada is nowhere near meeting even Harper's non-credible climate targets should underscore the need for workers and environmentalists to be focused on an energy plan that will make a difference. 

My welfare food challenge: Day 2

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Day 2, and I've already bent the rules. The battle against the cold is not going well, so I'm taking some cold medicine and drinking tea (which was not in my budget).

Otherwise, still on the plan. For dinner last night I had some of the large soup I made in preparation (it's actually pretty good, if I do say so myself).

But overall, eating on this budget is a very plain affair.

Appreciate all the comments people have written in response to my Day 1 post -- many more than I'm accustomed to. Clearly this challenge is capturing some interest, and sparking a dialogue about welfare rates (which is the point). Thanks to all who added your shopping advice. True, if I were buying for a month or for two people, I'd be able to buy more bulk items and stretch each dollar a bit further. And no doubt I would get somewhat smarter at the shopping if this was a longer-term reality (although I was very careful and zeroed in on the cheapest/sale options). But I doubt it would make a huge difference, either to the amount of food or to the narrow nutritional content.

The comments that stand out to me are from those who note how much harder this would be with kids, or without a car, or when the local food options are very limited, or when the monotony of this diet is an on-going reality of life, rather then merely a week-long challenge. It's clear that when you are on a budget like this, the smallest additional need (for a personal hygiene item, or a child's item, or medicine, etc.) can completely throw your budget into turmoil, leaving even less for food.

I especially appreciate the notes from those of you who really do live on social assistance, and for whom this is not a symbolic game. What your comments capture is the stress that inherently builds when this is a longer-term reality. When I was shopping on Monday, I made a point of asking a store clerk if they had any cheaper/old veggies in the back, only to have him look at me oddly and say they can't sell that. And when I had to leave a lot of items at the check-out till, it felt a bit embarrassing. My income and privilege allows be to walk through life with a lot of confidence, so these momentary interactions roll off my back. But if these small humiliations were a regular feature of my daily life, there is no question they would be stressful.

Research tells us clearly that such stress is bad for one's health, and we all pay for that (as Iglika Ivanova notes in her CCPA report on The Cost of Poverty in BC).

Had plain oatmeal again for breakfast. Will make that pasta for lunch and add chickpeas for some protein. I was to have a dinner meeting tonight, scheduled a while back, but as I can't afford it, I had to re-arrange my plans. Meeting for tea instead and bringing a sandwich.

Montreal revolutionaries, Canadian security and race: An interview with author David Austin

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AppId is over the quota

Recently, Montreal writer David Austin published Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, a groundbreaking work that details the significant breadth and scope of Black Power activism in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s.

The book particularly highlights two important events, the Congress of Black Writers that took place at McGill University in 1968 and the Sir George Williams Affair student action in 1969 at the campus that is now Concordia University.

The book also deeply explores the relationship between Black Power movements and Québécois revolutionary movements during the period, illuminating a very different tone to Québec political discourse then what is common today.

I sent David Austin a series of questions on his recent book, and the ways that the ideas outlined in the book are critically important for progressives in Québéc and Canada today to learn about.

In your recent book Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal you highlight ways that Black Power activism in Montreal was inspired by Black liberation struggles, both in the U.S., but also internationally. Can you highlight a sense of Black Power activism in Montreal during this period, and ways it echoed beyond the city limits?

Sixties Montreal was Canada’s cosmopolitan centre that attracted people from all over the world. During this period, thousands of people from the Caribbean migrated to the city and joined the pre­-existing Black population that included individuals whose roots in Canada went back to the days of slavery.

This was a time in which the Civil Rights and Black Power movements not only challenged the political establishment in the U.S., but galvanized people all over the world.

It was also a period of anti­-colonial struggle, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, the Vietnam War and the anti­-war movement and a time in which music assumed a political tenor and tone that was explicitly political and explicitly about change in a manner that was in keeping with times.

The events in Montreal during this period were a local response to Canadian racial oppression and part of the global spirit of the time. Given Canada’s close proximity to the U.S. and its historical ties to the Caribbean, the Black population was able to draw on its ties to both the U.S. and the Caribbean and make Montreal an important centre of local and international Black political activity well out of proportion to the size of this population.

One group you highlight in the book is the Caribbean Conference Committee, what significance did that group have for Black Power struggles not only in Montreal but also in the Caribbean?

The Caribbean Conference Committee (CCC) and particularly the C.L.R. James Study Circle (CLRJSC) was comprised of a small number of Caribbean women and men who were concerned primarily with Caribbean liberation and used their time in Canada (the group was based in Montreal but had members in Toronto, Ottawa, Wolfville Nova Scotia and other parts of Canada, the U.S. and of course the Caribbean) to prepare themselves politically-­intellectually for the concrete struggles and movements they intended to be a part of in the Caribbean.

Between 1965 and 1967 the CCC organized a series of conferences and events on the Caribbean that brought to the city many of the Anglophone Caribbean’s leading thinkers and writers, including the Trinidadian political thinker C.L.R. James, Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best, the Jamaican writer and sociologist Orlando Patterson, the Grenadian-­Trinidadian calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow and the Barbadian writer George Lamming.

The CCC’s conferences, and the CLRJSC political work that laid the groundwork for the Congress of Black Writers to take place in Montreal in 1968 and helped to create a left political consciousness among Blacks in the city that translated into the Congress of Black Writers and influenced the events at Sir George Williams University (present ­day Concordia University).

In many ways, members of the CCC­-CLRJSC played an important, at times central role, in the renewal of the Caribbean left, or at least a particular understanding of it, beginning with founding of Abeng in Jamaica in 1968 after Walter Rodney was expelled from Jamaica, and culminating with the Grenada Revolution.

Thanks. Two key events that are addressed in your book, and also in your organizing work over the past decade, are the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir GeorgeWilliams Affair. Can you describe those events briefly and their importance for Black political consciousness in Quebec and beyond?

The Congress of Black Writers was held at McGill University between October 11 and 14, 1968. It brought together many of the leading Black Power figures of the time -- Stokely Carmichael, Harry Edwards, James Forman, Walter Rodney -- as well as elder pan­-Africanists and socialists such as C.L.R. James and Richard B. Moore. The legendary South African singer Mariam Makeba was also present, although she did not speak during the event (all of the speakers were men).

For that weekend, the city was transformed into the Black Power centre and the speakers were widely covered in the French and English media. What the event did in Canada was to raise the specter of race and publicly announce that race and racism were a component part of Canadian society in a way that could not be ignored.

The so-­called Sir George Williams Affair was a Black-­led student protest that erupted when a complaint of racism by several students, the majority from the Caribbean, arguing that they were being systematically awarded low or failing grades in a biology class was mishandled by the university’s administration.

In the end, this was, in many ways, the most significant student protest in Canada during the 1960s, not only in term of its scope and the way in which it raised the issue of racism and other forms of injustice in Canada, but also in terms of its over two million­ dollar cost to the university. It also sparked protests in support of the students and those who were arrested at the end of the occupation and created a stir within the government and among federal politicians.

In the case of Trinidad, the protests almost resulted in the overthrow of the government and the entire incident became a diplomatic mess for Canada. And yet, with few exceptions (Sean Mill’s work on the 1960s among them) both the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams Affair, as well as Black politics in Montreal during this period in general, are reduced to footnotes in Canadian and 1960s history.

The question of repression is a running theme throughout the book. Can you explain the role that RCMP repression of Black political organizing played, and what this suggests to us about how race, sex and security function in our daily lives?

The RCMP was profoundly concerned with the public Black political organizing in Montreal in the 1960s. Not only were they concerned with the local Black political organizing, which included ties between the growing Haitian community and Anglophone Blacks, but also the international connections that Blacks were making in the U.S., working in connection with figures like Stokely Carmichael who was seen as the voice of Black Power, and members of the Black Panther Party; and in connection with the Caribbean left and Black Power advocates there and in Britain. The RCMP was also concerned with Black-­White solidarity, including Black and French Quebecois solidarity, which they observed with alarm and a sense of dread.

There was an opening to genuine solidarity at that moment -- which is evident in the sympathetic coverage in the French Quebec press at the time -- that has since narrowed considerably. Beneath these fears, however, was a more primordial fear, what I refer to as bio-sexual politics, or biosexuality --primeval fear of Black-­White sexual encounters, and especially between Black men and White women, which appears in the RCMP files of that time.

As I argue, this fear is rooted in slavery in which the fear of Black rebellion was related to a fear of presumed stereotypical Black male sexual prowess; and in the idea that, if left to their own devices, Black men would wantonly consort with White women and contaminate the purity and sanctity of these women whose status was psychologically tied up with the notion of White racial pride superiority, White male supremacy and a male-­centred nationalism that was nonetheless invested by men in the bodies of White women.

As during the period of slavery in Canada and other parts of the Americas, Black men were -- as they are today in ways that are somewhat different from the fear of Black women -- seen as a grave security risk to be controlled and contained for fear that their politics and genes would contaminate the mythological pure nation-­state. This experience tells us that we have yet to fully appreciate the extent to which race permeates our society and has breached our consciousness, and hinders our inability to simply get beyond it. Race and racism are deeply embedded in the consciousness and persists in slavery’s afterlife in psychosocial ways that shape our daily human encounters and prevent genuine human solidarity across ethno-­racial lines.

Your book also includes significant reflections on Québécois revolutionarymovements and specifically on Pierre Vallières's book Nègres blancs d'Amérique, its title that remains with us in Québec until today in a broad cultural sense. Wondering if you could highlight a couple points as to why the book and its context are significant in relation to your research?

Up until the 1960s, race in Canada was understood in terms of the English and French, not simply as the two founding nations but as the two founding "races." This is evident in Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes, a defining Canadian national narrative text. Of course, McLennan, like the official Canadian national narrative, omits the presence and plight of indigenous peoples and contains two very unflattering descriptions of Blacks.

Vallières’s book Nègres blancs d'Amérique was part of the shift in French Québécois consciousness in which he, as other French Quebeckers did, drew on the language of U.S. Black Power and, drawing on the writing of figures such Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant of Martinique, declared himself a white nègres which he translated as "nigger" as opposed to "Negro."

While this move was designed to, justifiably, highlight the plight of French Quebeckers in an English dominated Quebec and Canada, it ultimately served, and continues to serve, to obscure the presence of real nègres in Montreal. This occurred at the very time when the RCMP was taking notice of the Blacks in Montreal and across Canada as a result of their more organized public presence, essentially making Blacks invisible within the Quebec national narrative of loss and the road redemption.

The character Marion, a Black mother and domestic worker in Mairuth Sarsfield’s novel, No Crystal Stair, perhaps best captures Black responses to this sentiment. She responded with sarcasm and resentment to a comment from her fictional French Canadian employer who compared the plight of French Quebecers to Black Americans -- "Les nègres blancs, indeed!"

Also your book outlines a certain blindness from Québec social movements, both in past generations and today, to the struggles of Black Canadians or new immigrants, or indigenous people, could you expand your thoughts on this point?

As I have mentioned, the 1960s represented a moment during which French Quebeckers took note of the province's growing independent Black population and reached out to it, as did members of the Black community reach out to French Quebeckers.

Figures like singer Pauline Julien and poet and eventual Quebec politician Gérald Godin, who attended the Congress of Black Writers and was sufficiently moved by speaker Rocky Jones of Nova Scotia to write in the margins of his conference program that Jones discussion on the plight of Blacks in Canada spoke directly to how he felt as a French Quebecker.

Julien, Godin and others took note of and made alliances with Blacks in Montreal and there was, at that moment, a sense of comradeship and growing understanding and a more open nationalism in Quebec that, however, failed to materialize in the long­-term and has become increasingly foreclosed in the present.

Having drawn on the experience of people of African descent in the cause of Quebec liberation, the leadership of this province and, sadly, most of the Quebec left, has embraced a brand of nationalism that reduces the province’s Black population to that of an undesirable guest in their home -- a manner that would have been very unsettling for Vallières who later developed a far more expansive definition of what it meant to be a Quebecker, one that recovered the memory of indigenous peoples and understood that the rest of us, having come here by various means, are all immigrants of one kind or another. I’m perhaps stretching his perspective a little, but this was certainly the road that he was travelling.

David Austin is the author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security and Sixties Montreal and the forthcoming The Unfinished Revolution: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Poetry, and the New Society. He is also the editor of You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. For many years he worked as a community and youth worker in Montreal and has produced radio documentaries for CBC’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon.

Stefan Christoff is a Montreal artist and community activist who contributes to rabble.ca. You can find Stefan tweeting here.

Image provided by Stefan Christoff.