Energy East pipeline condemned by OEB

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... Joe Johnson was for him exciting and enjoyable. The victory came when courts struck down the deportation section of the For personal reasons I moved to St Louis in 1968 where for three years I helped build a new YSA chap­ ter where there was no functioning SWP branch. In this He recalled, “For myself, the most exciting part was an relative isolation I didn’t fully appreciate the scope of extensive national tour I took speaking about the case changes taking place in the party on the national level and raising funds for my defense. The tour was over 99 and in the Twin Cities branch. The old party leadership days and 25,000 miles long that took me to most of the was intensively training new young ones. Jack Barnes States, most of the large cities and all of the branches was slated to take over the national secretary position of the SWP in the U.S. The cost of the tour was small­ from Farrell Dobbs, and YSA leaders were being sent to est that anyone had knowledge of. The Greyhound Bus Co. had a promotion travel ticket that year (they never When I moved back to the Twin Cities in 1971 I found repeated it) where you could get a national one-way a much bigger branch in a new spacious headquarters.

Antiwar work was at its peak but the party was also “We worked out a master-ticket for myself. I went intervening in a resurgent feminist movement, a new first to Seattle; then down the West Coast; then back to environmental movement, an experiment with building Denver; then to Texas and the South; then up the East a new independent Black party, and even some mod­ Coast to New Jersey, New York, Boston, etc.; then to the est trade-union work. The Twin Cities Socialist Forum Midwest; to Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, etc.; then back to was thriving, branch bookstore sales were growing by Minneapolis. I spoke on TV, radio, had newspaper inter­ leaps and bounds, and the party ran some lively elec­ views, a full page in the Christian Science Monitor, etc.

“I traveled light with one small duffle bag. I tried to Joe Johnson, who was neither youth nor old-timer, sleep in a bed every two or three days. Comrades made was no longer organizer and had to adjust to a new role me a guest in their homes and gave me cooked meals in the party. While this couldn’t have been easy, I never and a change of underwear. I lived on approximately heard him complain, and during this period of party $2.15 per day. I was able to raise thousands for the de­ prosperity he gave new young leaders the support they fense case and a large number of people told me they joined the party after my speeches. We won the case Relieved of the demands of branch organizer, Joe de­ voted some attention to issues of strong personal inter­ It was typical of Joe’s spartan endurance that what est. One was solidarity with workers behind bars—he’d would have been an exhausting sacrifice for most of us been there. In 1972, in response to several brutally re­ New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair can’t have it both ways. It’s ei­ ther build an oil pipeline, or protect the environment from further harm.

Many NDP members and voters favour keeping the oil in the ground, a view ex­ pressed by Linda McQuaig, the party’s star candidate in Toronto Centre, before she was slapped down by Conservative Party henchmen and silenced by Mul­ cair’s managers.

But the Ontario Energy Board bol­ stered the argument for keeping the bi­ tumin buried. The OEB, in a 96-page re­ port issued in mid-August, says that the risks exceed the rewards when it comes to the $12 Billion Energy East pipeline proposed by TransCanada Corp.

A major oil spill would likely cost more than $1 billion to clean up. It would cause long-term contamination of drinking water, land, and aboriginal hunting and fishing grounds. That’s weighed against 4200 jobs to build the line, only 1400 once the pipeline is in operation, and a forecast injection of up to $19 billion in wages and taxes in the 40 years after oil starts flowing from Al­ berta to the East Coast.

(continued from page 8: “Joe Johnson — The Man Without a Country”) speaking tour. ticket for $99.00 that would last for 99 days. and I enjoyed the tour greatly.”

Then there’s climate change—an in­ calculable consequence. A new pipe­ line, even one immune to stress corro­ sion, would encourage more tar-sands development, which would increase carbon emissions and thus escalate global warming.

Not surprisingly, business groups are lobbying for Energy East. Indigenous communities along the planned route are mostly opposed. Public opinion in Quebec is strongly against it.

Ultimately, it’s up to the National En­ ergy Board and the federal cabinet to decide.

Now, however, is the time for NDP members, socially conscious labour unionists, and environmental activists to weigh in on the issue. Tom Mulcair’s vague policy—for a pipeline that meets an environmental review more rigor­ ous than Stephen Harper’s—should be dumped in favour of a plan for a rapid shift to green energy alternatives. Such a shift must be premised on No New Pipelines, and public ownership of Big Oil and Gas, under workers’ control, to fund and engineer the transition.

— B.W.

Smith Act. branches to become organizers. tion campaigns.

needed and deserved.