I worked at the Chevron oil refinery in Burnaby a couple of times as a pipefitter. That's where a lot of the oil from the original Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline goes. My first time was still as an apprentice in that kind of live industrial environment. Loud noises, hisses, banging, and permits required before you did anything. I wasn't used to wearing a gas monitor, shaving every day so I could put on a respirator or knowing where to go, what to do or when.
It must have showed because an older pipefitter took me under his wing and let me work with him and his partner. I can't count the mistakes I made in front of them, and those are just the ones I'm aware of. They were incredibly patient with me, and as I started to get the hang of things the conversation moved from what I could improve to what was going on with our lives.
He was 30 years older than me, and I learned he lived in Campbell River. Which was strange because that's a two hour drive away from the Nanaimo ferry, another hour and half ferry ride and then another 45 minutes drive to the refinery from Horsehoe Bay, depending on traffic and how much you could decided to speed. With ferry waits and bathroom breaks that's a five hour commute each way – which is impossible to do twice every work day.
Turns out he was renting a room somewhere in Burnaby, and would make the long commute back on most weekends to see his wife. He was like a lot of other people I've gotten to know – former pulp mill workers who'd had to take what they could get after the mill they thought they would retire at shut down. I met a lot on that job, all trying to find ways to keep working under less than ideal circumstances at jobs where it was understood you would never be permanent. Most of us got laid off a couple of days before Christmas, and we haven't kept in touch more than for me to know that he's now divorced and still coming back to Vancouver for work when he can.
The older guys would all tell wistful stories in the break shacks. Either about steady work for years at pulp mills, or how you could actually get ahead if you bounced around to scheduled mill maintenance “shutdowns” where they did long hours in remote places. You'd be away from your family for months at a time, but the overtime money could put kids through university.
Those days are long gone. Over 100 mills have closed in BC in the last 20 years. The best trees are gone too, but the industry continues to cut what's left at an unsustainable pace. 26 million cubic meters between 2013 and 2016. Now they are shipped “raw” without any processing, and therfor without any need for local pulp mills.
Some of the younger guys have similar stories about working in the Alberta Tar Sands when oil was $150 a barrel and they couldn't get enough workers. You'd freeze your fingers and eat disgusting food in a camp made of cramped portable trailers, but you could come back with enough for a down payment on a house. Those days are pretty much done now too. Suicide rates spiked 30% when oil price dropped and the mass layoff started happening in 2015. Even though most out of province workers have returned home, Albertans continue to have a tough time finding good work.
I snuck into a new job as a Power Engineer just before the schools realized that by meeting industry demands they were pumping out way too many people for the amount of jobs that were left. Out of my new crew of five, three had all come from the same pulp mill after it had shut down.
The point I'm making is that this is not accidental. It's a pattern. The resource industry is driven by profit for corporations and capitalist elite not human need. They devour the resources and spit out the workers when there's nothing left. It happened with forestry, it happened with fisheries and now it's happening with oil and gas.
Which is why I've never had a problem as someone trained in jobs traditionally associated with unsustainable resource extraction, opposing projects which further perpetrate what I've seen first hand as destructive and with few real benefits for poor and working people.
The Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion is another one of these projects, which if built would allow the totally destructive Alberta Tar Sands to continue producing some of the dirtiest oil on the planet when there are already viable clean energy alternatives. We have written extensively about the fact that if the Trudeau-approved Kinder Morgan and Line 3 pipelines are built, it would make it impossible to meet Canada's modest United Nations climate commitments. The commitments are based on the standard which the broad scientific consensus agrees would be the minimum to avoid catastrophic climate change and the likely end of the human race.
All that for 50 full time jobs when the pipeline is done? Ridiculous.
These facts are why so many people are so opposed to the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Indigenous nations are building tiny houses and healing lodges to stop the pipeline as it crosses their traditional territories. Burnaby residents get up early and stand in the rain to stop construction vehicle traffic working on the Kinder Morgan marine terminal expansion. Large groups of people meet in front of TD Banks every month to protest its financing of the pipeline expansion. The list goes on. We haven't stopped the pipeline yet, but it hasn't been built and Kinder Morgan is reporting huge delays and $75 million a month losses as long as it remains unbuilt. We haven't stopped the project entirely, but as long as we are fighting we have a fighting chance.
I've also met more and more trades people at different Kinder Morgan demonstrations. We aren't the majority, but we can play an important role in the movement given our direct experience with just how toxic and dangerous these oil refineries are, and how little the corporations care for our safety or our livelihoods when push comes to shove. I've heard many times, “What if they had a war and everyone refused to fight?” I feel the same way about building dirty oil pipelines.
Follow Thomas Davies on Twitter: @thomasdavies59
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