Ah, Justin Trudeau, what have you done?

The political love affair many south of the 49th parallel have had with our neighbor-to-the-north’s young prime minister has just suffered its first serious setback and, frankly, the timing stinks.

Is it not bad enough that we have to deal with the cards the electoral college has dealt us without now feeling as though we have to pick a fight with the closest thing this country has to a best friend?

This is, sadly, the situation that we residents of Puget Sound — caretakers of the Salish Sea and champions of our beloved Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW) — now find ourselves in in light of the Canadian government’s recent decision to approve two oil pipeline expansion projects. The one that will have the biggest impact on our neighborhood, so to speak, is the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

There was significant opposition from the cities of Vancouver, Victoria and Burnaby, coastal First Nations tribes and many environmental organizations in both Canada and the U.S., all explicitly detailing the ecological disaster this pipeline would create, including the likely extinction of the Southern Resident Killer Whales. The decision to move forward was an uncharacteristic one, given Canada’s recent announcement of a $1.5 billion marine protection plan, its commitment to phase out coal-generated electricity by 2030 and its support of the Paris Climate Agreement. And while I’m sure that the financial boon to both Alberta and Canada’s economy weighed heavily, I am also sure that the prime minister faced a Goliath of an adversary in the oil industry — I do not envy the choices he had to make, but I do believe this was the wrong choice.

The Trans Mountain line already exists, built to carry Alberta tar-sands oil to the coast of British Columbia in 1953 by Houston-based Kinder Morgan. From the line’s coastal terminus in Burnaby, oil is shipped via tankers down the Washington coast, as well as into Puget Sound, primarily to be unloaded onto trains for transport throughout the western states and beyond. The line’s current capacity is about 300,000 barrels of oil a day, with one tanker traveling through the shared waters of the Salish Sea per week. The expansion plan proposes to build another, bigger line, essentially parallel to the current one, in order to increase capacity to 890,000 barrels a day (a far larger capacity than the Dakota Access Pipeline) and tanker traffic by close to 700 percent — which would mean one tanker in Puget Sound nearly every single day, or about 350 per year, in waters whose ecosystem is already fragile.

According to a vessel-traffic risk assessment done by analysts at George Washington University (as reported by The Seattle Times), this would create a ninefold increase in the likelihood of a significant oil spill during the next 10 years in a core area of the endangered killer whales’ spring-summer habitat. The oil coming from Alberta’s tar sands is called bitumen. Different from regular crude, it is super thick and heavy, requiring chemical dilution just to make it flow. Also unlike regular crude, which sits on the surface of water, bitumen sinks. Cleaning it up is reportedly nearly impossible without dredging the affected sea floor. As Fred Felleman, a Seattle Port commissioner has said of the possibility of this kind of spill in Puget Sound, it would be “a scenario of truly nightmarish proportions.”

Aside from the catastrophe of a spill and its subsequent destruction of the already tenuous food chain that our whales depend on, there is the issue of vessel noise, which has been shown in several studies to interfere with the whales’ communication, ability to locate food and each other. So even without a spill, the whales will have trouble finding their already scarce salmon, and the noise could also interfere with familial groups — which are crucial to this species survival — being able to stay together.

These factors have led many conservationists and biologists, including those at Washington’s Center for Whale Research, to speculate that if this pipeline expansion goes ahead, it will likely lead to the extinction of the struggling Southern Residents.

The mayors of the cities involved and close to the line have vowed to continue to fight this planned expansion, as have the indigenous communities on the B.C. and Washington coasts and elected and environmental officials here in Washington.

Despite the fact that the pipeline is in Canada, the decision has repercussions that reach beyond the border. The waters of the Salish Sea are shared, so it falls to both countries to protect them, as well as the SRKWs. It is our responsibility to do what we can to prevent the further endangerment and possible extinction of these incredible mammals — we already hunted them to near non-existence 50 years ago.

While the Dakota Access Pipeline is still a grave concern despite recent developments (the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit denial only shuffles the issue to the incoming president), there is a good possibility that Puget Sound residents are facing a similar fight that is far more complicated.

The question is what can we do? What are we prepared to do?

— Sarah Low is a

Beachcomber reporter.





