Anti-pipeline protesters staged a rally in downtown Victoria Monday morning, forcing the closure of the Canada Revenue Agency building at Vancouver and Johnson Streets for a time.
The group, describing itself as "settlers in solidarity with Indigenous land defenders", carried a large paper mache salmon, and signs calling on the federal government not to use tax resources to subsidize the Kinder Morgan pipeline.
Bob Arbess says the event was aimed at sending a message to the Prime Minister that public funds should not be used to subsidize the project.
Arbess says the project, and tar sands development, flies in the face of our country's global climate commitments:
"The Canadian Prime Minister not only went to Paris and signed a climate accord that committed out country to stay below a certain level of greenhouse gas emissions, but then turned around and is approving a massive build out of the Canadian tarsands, which is probably one of the dirtiest sources of fossil fuel on the planet. "
Protesters also heard from Ariel Deranger, Executive Director of Indigenous Climate Change, based in Northern Alberta -- currently fighting a massive tarsands mine proposed by Tech Corporation -- something she says would fuel carbon emissions for the next 100 years.
" We have to be sending a clear message that now is not the time to be throwing taxpayers dollars, Canadian citizen's dollars, towards backing this pipeline, which is directly connected to out-of-control of expansion of Alberta's tarsands. And that's where I come from. I come from a community that is located downstream from Alberta's tarsands."
Deranger says both Alberta's premier and Canada's Prime Minister have broken major campaign promises to back the international corporation behind Kinder Morgan:
"Premier Notley and Justin Trudeau, for the matter, were both elected on some pretty progressive platforms. Platforms that included doing an overhaul of environmental regulatory policies, both provincially and nationally. As well as looking at taking aggressive action on climate change."
Deranger says the conversation on climate commitments and ecosystem stabilization have been completely left out of the messaging coming from government, adding as we talk about changing energy needs for the future, we are actually locking ourselves in to fossil fuel dependency by continuing to develop more and more projects.
Both Deranger and Arbess also say with several Indigenous nations maintaining Trans Mountain fundamentally violates protocols that govern their way of life, the project breaches the principals of UNDRIP, the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
.