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“The president of Air Canada has to say, ‘there is a risk.’ He cannot guarantee there will not be another airline crash,” said Brenda Kenny, president of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association.

“The RCMP cannot guarantee there won’t be a terrorist attack in Canada. The owner of any major food company cannot guarantee there won’t be a mishap relating to food safety.”

“What we all need to do is ensure we are aware of the risk, and we’re driving it as hard and as quickly as possible to zero risk, and that we understand how to cope with any consequence that might occur should we inadvertently miss something.”

The Canadian pipeline industry’s safety record claim is based on assertions that 99.999 per cent of oil and gas is shipped safely via pipeline to its destination. In 2011, the industry transported 1.3 billion barrels of oil and 5.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The less flattering spin is that while many of the incidents in 2011 involved amounts as small as a smudge or a teaspoon, one was the kind of public relations nightmare that makes it tougher for proponents advocating Northern Gateway’s proposed $6.5-billion pipeline to Kitimat or Kinder Morgan’s proposed tripling of the capacity of its existing 300,000-barrel-a-day line to Burnaby.

A 28,000-barrel rupture in northern Alberta in 2011 was worse, in terms of volume, than the Kalamazoo River disaster a year earlier in the U.S.

Plains Midstream Canada, the company responsible, is facing up to $1.5 million in fines on top of the estimated $30 million in cleanup costs.