Enbridge Inc, a Calgary-based oil and gas company has proposed the construction of a 1,170 km pipeline running from Alberta’s tar sands to Kitimat on British Columbia’s west coast. From here, crude oil would be loaded into super tankers bound for Asia. Before reaching the open ocean, these tankers would first need to pass through some of the most dangerous navigable waters in the world―the narrow inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Long protected by the 1972 Trudeau government moratorium on crude oil tankers plying British Columbia’s north coast, these waters are now facing the risk of oil spill. Potentially, 225 Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCC) per year would each transport approximately 2 million barrells of oil through the Great Bear Rainforest. In context, today’s supertankers carry ten times the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Put simply, the pristine marine and terrestrial ecosystems as well as the people of the Great Bear would likely not recover from such an incident.