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Enbridge Employees Go Door-To-Door In Kitimat Before Vote On Northern Gateway

Kitimat residents are fighting back as Enbridge scales up its campaign to sway the town’s plebiscite vote on the company’s Northern Gateway oil pipeline, which would see oil loaded onto 225 tankers a year at a proposed Kitimat terminal.

Having already launched an advertising blitz, Enbridge now has teams of paid canvassers knocking on doors throughout the community of 9,000 people. Door-knockers include Ray Doering, Enbridge’s manager of engineering from Calgary, Colin Kinsley, former mayor of Prince George and chair of the Enbridge-funded Northern Gateway Alliance, and other out-of-town Enbridge employees.

“It’s the weirdest feeling having strangers in your town canvassing for this big company. It feels like it's none of their business,” says Patricia Lange, a volunteer with community group Douglas Channel Watch. “It feels very invasive.”

Mike Langegger, another Kitimat resident, posted a letter online about receiving a phone call from the company: “I was appalled the other day when I received a call at home from Northern Gateway staff asking me if I was aware of the plebiscite and how I intended to vote.”

Enbridg canvassers blitz Kitimat

A team of Enbridge canvassers blitz a Kitimat residential street. Photo: Patricia Lange.

Douglas Channel Watch is rallying to pull together funds to run ads of its own and has teams of local volunteers going door-to-door. As soon as the group got signs up around town, Enbridge followed suit with signs right next to them.

“Our group, we don’t have the money,” Lange told DeSmog Canada. “But we’re finding it’s really great to be talking individually to people.”

Enbridge signs

Signs made by Kitimat citizens are accompanied by signs placed by Enbridge Northern Gateway on the streets of Kitimat. Photo: Kathy Ouwehand.

In January, the District of Kitimat council decided to survey its residents on their opinions on Enbridge’s oil proposal in a non-binding plebiscite vote to be held April 12 — but the district didn’t put in place any spending restrictions, in part because the Local Government Act doesn’t contain any limits for advertising during elections or plebiscites.

This is in stark contrast to the rules during a provincial election or initiative vote, during which Elections BC restricts how much companies and other third-party advertisers can spend. During a B.C. election, third-party advertising is capped at $3,137.93 per electoral district. The rules apply to all forms of advertising, including media advertising, brochures, signs and websites.

So far, during it’s Kitimat plebiscite campaign, Enbridge has run ads in eight northern B.C. newspapers and at least one local radio station, dropped handouts at hundreds of homes, placed signs around town, called households and launched a “Vote Yes For Kitimat” website.

Enbridge canvas cardDeSmog Canada research indicates Enbridge’s ad spend on the Kitimat plebiscite so far easily exceeds $15,000 — nearly five times what the company would be allowed to spend during a provincial election.

Due to the absence of rules, Enbridge is also allowed an unlimited budget to pay teams of out-of-town canvassers. During a provincial initiative petition, like the one that launched the HST referendum, canvassers who collect signatures must be volunteers and must live in B.C.

Despite this, Kitimat’s mayor doesn’t seem to see a problem.

“It’s very much feels like a municipal election and everybody has the right to do what they want to promote their cause,” Mayor Joanne Monaghan told the Vancouver Observer on Monday. “That's democracy.”

Dermod Travis, executive director of Integrity BC, disagrees.

"No holds barred is not democracy. The fact that so many jurisdictions in Canada have rules to make votes fair demonstrates that elections and referendums should never be a free-for-all. Limits exist for a reason: fairness," Travis told DeSmog Canada.

Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba have campaign finance rules that limit spending in local elections, Travis says, noting B.C. has the weakest rules in all of Canada.

With Enbridge spending thousands of dollars and no spending restrictions in sight, Kitimat residents are taking matters into their own hands.

Lange has four generations of her family in Kitimat and thinks the risks of the project aren’t worth the benefit for her community.She admits she was “terrified” of knocking on people’s doors at first, but has now been out canvassing nearly every day for the past week.

“We’re trying to reach everyone in town,” she says. “The people who have tried it are wanting to go again and again.”

Douglas Channel Watch has set up a website so it can accept donations to help pay for sign-making materials, handouts and ads.

“I want my grandchildren to live here,” Lange says. “There are only 50 jobs for local people at the end of the day. The amount of money that brings into our economy we could get in other ways.”

Though the plebiscite is not binding, it could boost Enbridge’s PR efforts if it goes their way and it would send a political message if residents vote down the project.

“It’s an opportunity to send a message to Ottawa and to say that this small town, the terminus and the one that might benefit the most from this project in B.C., we say no,” Lange says. “ That’s the reason I’m out there.”

Enbridge did not respond to a request for comment.

Main photo: Kathy Ouwehand

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In an oil-rich province like Alberta, that kind of reporting is crucial. But look at our investigative work on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline to the west, or our Greenbelt reporting out in Ontario. They all highlight one thing: those with power over our shared natural world don’t want you to know how — or why — they call the shots. And we try to disrupt that.

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Like a kid in a candy store
When those boxes of heavily redacted documents start to pile in, reporters at The Narwhal waste no time in looking for kernels of news that matter the most. Just ask our Prairies reporter Drew Anderson, who gleefully scanned through freedom of information files like a kid in a candy store, leading to pretty damning revelations in Alberta. Long story short: the government wasn’t being forthright when it claimed its pause on new renewable energy projects wasn’t political. Just like that, our small team was again leading the charge on a pretty big story

In an oil-rich province like Alberta, that kind of reporting is crucial. But look at our investigative work on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline to the west, or our Greenbelt reporting out in Ontario. They all highlight one thing: those with power over our shared natural world don’t want you to know how — or why — they call the shots. And we try to disrupt that.

Our journalism is powered by people just like you. We never take corporate ad dollars, or put this public-interest information behind a paywall. Will you join the pod of Narwhals that make a difference by helping us uncover some of the most important stories of our time?

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