Friends of the Lubicon
PO Box 444 Stn D,
Etobicoke ON M9A 4X4
Tel: (416) 763-7500
Email: fol (at) tao (dot) ca
www.lubicon.ca
February 12, 2008
This morning a Statement of Intent to Participate in the Alberta Utilities Commission hearing on TransCanada's Application to build a pipeline across unceded Lubicon land was registered for BP Canada Energy Company. BP's Statement is dated February 8th but it presumably came in later in the day on the 8th and so didn't get recorded until today.
The British Petroleum (BP) Statement says that BP "has a bone fide interest in the Application...(because)... BP's interests extend without limitation to all aspects of the natural gas business as an explorer, producer, marketer, shipper, and field plant owner/operator; to the natural gas liquids business as owner/operator of straddle plants at Empress (Alberta) and purchaser, shipper and marketer of NGLs; and to developments that will have an impact on the Canadian oil sands as BP Canada has recently acquired an interest in the Sunrise field".
"Extend without limitation" is a revealing choice of words the import of which cannot fully be appreciated without reference to the history of British Petroleum.
BP is another big time international operator with a long history of complicity with colonial governments to push aside indigenous populations in pursuit of valuable natural resources. It started out as a German firm that came up with the name BP as a tricky way to sell it's products in Britain. During WWI the British government seized the assets of the German firm and transferred them to a genuinely British company that controlled the oil industry in Iran called Anglo-Persian Oil (later Anglo-Iranian Oil). In the process the British government became a major shareholder of Anglo-Persian Oil and Anglo-Persian Oil provided the oil to fuel the British Navy. The powerful British Navy then of course enabled the British to rule a global colonial empire for many years on which the sun never set.
During WWII the Allies forced the neutral ruler of Iran to abdicate in favor of his compliant son so they could use Iran as a corridor for US aid to the Soviets. After the war restive Iranian nationalists moved to challenge the rule of the west's puppet king and to nationalize Iran's British-controlled oil industry. Iranian efforts to gain control of their own country precipitated western intervention in Iranian affairs again to prop the puppet king and impose a deal whereby Iranian's oil resources were divided up between Standard Oil of Indiana and Anglo-Iranian Oil with Anglo-Iranian Oil getting 40%. (The British only got 40% of somebody else's valuable resources because at this point British power globally was on the wane and US power was on the ascent.)
Shortly thereafter the name of Anglo-Iranian Oil was formally changed to British Petroleum.
Needless to say all of this set the stage for the angry Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the current mess in the middle east.
What's important about all of this is that Canada is in many ways a still functioning remnant of the British Colonial Empire -- including the hewers of wood and drawers of water economy, the inherited British Parliamentary form of government that systematically tends to underpin the status quo, the existence of a privileged elite for whom the same rules frequently do not apply, the extent to which corporate interests take precedence over public interests, and the way Canadian government and their resource company cronies run rough-shod over the rights of indigenous peoples. There are no better examples of the colonial nature of Canadian society than effective denial of Lubicon land rights and the elaborate pretense of regulation of the gas and oil industry in Alberta.
fol-request at masses.tao.ca