With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/411627
december 2014 BCBusiness 65 bcbusiness.ca the continent and itself a relatively new entity that emerged out of the Enron debacle. Anderson's Canadian unit currently has annual revenues of almost $400 million, an estimated 85 per cent of which stem from the Trans Mountain system, which also includes terminals and a spur line to Washing- ton State. A native Manitoban, with the easy- going demeanour that his provenance suggests, Anderson has nevertheless developed some strong opinions about the reception the expansion project has received in Burnaby, especially when it comes to public figures like Corrigan. "The mayor has concluded that the expansion of our system, and to some extent the existing system, isn't consistent with his views about what kind of a community Burnaby should be," he says. "From that there's been created a heightened emotion based on fear." For his part, Corrigan doesn't dispute the gist of this. He does have a different vision for Burnaby, and he does harbour pipeline-related fears that he hasn't been shy to express. "I think that the major thing concerning the Lower Mainland and coastal B.C. in general is the potential tanker traffic and the idea of an accident," he says. "We also have a more parochial issue in that this is a tripling of the capac- ity for storage at the tank farm. We think that the location was very poorly chosen and that now it is hanging like the sword of Damocles over residential neighbourhoods and schools." Oh, and then there are the memories, still fresh, of a significant pipeline rupture in 2007 that bathed eight homes in crude and sent oil gushing into Burrard Inlet. Kinder Morgan was later found to have provided inadequate supervision to a contractor working for the city and additionally failed at first to turn off the correct taps. "That does not instill confidence in a municipality or in the residents," Corrigan says. Left unsaid, but certainly on the minds of many pipeline opponents, is the expansion's role as a route to export markets for oil sands bitumen compared to the current line's primary use as a supplier for local needs. In fact, tanker traffic would increase from about one a week to about one a day. There's also the whole carbon footprint argument in a region that takes the idea as seriously as anywhere on the continent. (On the flip side, the current lack of pipeline capacity has forced a lot of oil onto the rail system, which is costlier, more dangerous and far more energy intensive.) So, yes, Corrigan and the City of Burnaby have been actively attempting to sway opinion against the pipeline expansion, and their efforts seem to be working. "We've done our own polls," says Anderson, "and materially it's not different from theirs." the landscape Is a lot different in Kamloops, and not just because it receives less than 300 mm of precipitation annually compared to the 2,000 mm in soggy Burnaby. Still, the two cities have more in common than meets the eye. Burnaby, incorpo- rated in 1892, was long the second larg- est city in Metro Vancouver, surpassed in recent years by Surrey; Kamloops, incorporated in 1893, once vied to be B.C.'s second largest city outside of Metro Vancouver but in recent years has been left in the dust by up-and- comers like Kelowna. As well, both have a history of electing their share of New Democrats. The difference is that after former B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix came out against all pipelines on the eve of the disastrous 2013 provin- cial election, Burnaby elected NDPers in three of four constituencies (among them Kathy Corrigan, Derek's wife), while Kamloops voted strongly for the B.C. Liberals. In both cases some felt that the pipeline stance contributed to the outcome. Kamloops Chamber of Commerce President Aleece Laird isn't so sure that was the case, but she believes Derek Corrigan, mayor of Burnaby.