This summer in Saskatchewan, the company Husky Energy spilled 250,000 litres of crude oil into the North Saskatchewan River, the source of drinking water for nearly 100,000 people. Water now has to be transported to villages and communities by truck. Husky Energy has paid $5 million to Prince Albert, the largest city affected by the spill, to limit the damage. This heavy oil does not float, it flows and spreads over all seabed surfaces. The consequence of this is that only half of the oil spilled into the river has been cleaned, the other half that has sunk is not cleanable and never will be. Oops.
TransCanada’s proposed Energy East pipeline would allow for 1.1 million barrels of the same type of heavy oil per day to travel over a distance of 700 km in Quebec. This distance includes traversing more than 800 rivers, including the St. Lawrence where sixty percent of the Quebec population, or five million people, draw their drinking water. A spill of 250,000 liters of oil there would be catastrophic. But Energy East is an enormous pipeline project, with incomparably larger potential for harm than the spill in the North Saskatchewan River.
