British Columbia

Many Vancouverites are quite rightly enraged by the sight of oil-soaked birds struggling to survive around English Bay.

First Nations worry about the impact of the M/V Marathassafuel spill on the fishery.

For environmentalists, the recent accident confirmed their worst fears about the dangers associated with the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline project. If approved, it will triple shipments of diluted bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to the Lower Mainland and bring a massive increase in tanker traffic to Burrard Inlet.

Several hundred people marched through Fort Langley Saturday to oppose the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline that runs through Langley.

Organized by groups including the Pipe Up Network and the Kwantlen First Nation, the march headed from the Kwantlen reserve to the Fort Langley Community Hall.

The march paused in the center of the Jacob Haldi Bridge that connects MacMillan Island to the village of Fort Langley. Above the Fraser River, Kwantlen members drummed and sang before the march continued.

Following is an email synopsis of a Sooke, BC, Council meeting with Kinder Morgan by a Dogwood Initiative organizer:

The toxic bunker fuel that leaked from a ship into Vancouver's English Bay has washed up on the city's popular beach in Kitsilano.

Vancouver police told CBC News that there are visible clumps of oil on the shore at Kits Beach.

What is bunker fuel?

The Canadian Coast Guard said it was notified about a spill generated from an anchor point in English Bay at about 5 p.m. PT Wednesday.

Glaciers will be largely a thing of the past in Western Canada by the end of the century, placing stress on fish such as salmon that thrive in cold water and affecting hydro generation, according to a study by two B.C. researchers.

The recent Vancouver panel discussion on Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything, from which this article took form, was organized weeks before a local Blockadia event took place. By the time the five panelists came together, two had been arrested for defying a court injunction and two were named in a $5.6-million lawsuit for objecting to Kinder Morgan's (KM) planned pipeline through a municipally designated park on Burnaby Mountain.

The B.C. government’s abrupt decision to rescind its approval of a new B.C. treaty commissioner has opened a significant rift with the federal government and aboriginal groups it says it wants to do business with. But the politics and the personalities involved in the reversal have obscured the government’s intention: To back away from the treaty negotiation process it sees as a costly endeavour that has produced precious few results over the past two decades.

Kinder Morgan says its protocols dictate that it report "suspicious activities" like taking photos near its Burnaby Mountain facility, even though the surrounding area is Crown land on which they have no jurisdiction to prohibit photography.

SFU climate change scientist Tim Takaro says he felt "intimidated" when he got a call from Burnaby RCMP earlier this week asking him about photographs he took with Kinder Morgan infrastructure in the background. They also told him they knew he had been to protest rallies that had taken place there a few months earlier.

A B.C. climate change scientist says he got an "intimidating" call from RCMP because he had taken pictures on Burnaby Mountain near the site of a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Tim Takaro, a health sciences professor at SFU, says he was having lunch in Tofino with his family on Wednesday when his daughter's cellphone rang.

When she answered it, she was told it was the Burnaby RCMP calling and they were looking for her father.

A White Paper released by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions last month argues that fossil fuel divestment campaigns are based on a set of unfounded assumptions. The authors, Hadi Dowlatabadi and Justin Ritchie of UBC, make some valuable contributions to the debate over divestment. But their criticisms of the divestment advocates’ core arguments are off-base.