Oil tankers a ‘silly proposal’

If the current ban on some oil tankers is repealed, Arnie Nagy is ready to fight.

He’s a member of the Haida Nation and a former fisheries union leader who’s been fighting oil tankers since the 1970s, worried a spill could destroy a way of life that's been in his family “since time immemorial.”

“We’ve got to be united as Canadians, not divided on silly proposals,” he said, adding this is his top election issue and that Trump is being used as a distraction to push pipelines forward.

Bill C-48, passed in 2019, banned tankers that can carry more than 12,500 metric tons of oil from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska border. Ellis Ross, Conservative candidate for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, has called for more pipelines in B.C.

Nagy believes the real economic focus for this region should be on regrowing the commercial salmon fishery, which used to employ thousands through capture, manufacture and processing and now-defunct canneries.

NDP candidate Taylor Bachrach says any repeal on the tanker ban would be “really devastating” to the people throughout the riding.

“The implications of an oil spill in a wild salmon river or on the North Coast would last for over a century,” he says. “It’s not a risk people are willing to take.”