“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

Forty-eight cents! That’s what I remember paying for a gallon of gas in the mid-1960s when I bought my first car in Castlegar; a rusty, grey 1953 Austin that promptly expired a few months later but had the most comfortable leather seats in the world.

A few months later, I was attending university in Vancouver and regular gas could be bought in “gasoline alley” on Kingsway for as low as 42 cents-a-gallon – little more than 10 cents-a-litre – figure it out yourself and weep!

In those halcyon days, my standard purchase of gas was $2 – close to half-a-tank – in my 1964 Valiant slant-six, the most durable vehicle ever built – ask anyone who ever owned one – and in those days a gas jockey would wash your windshield and check your oil while you sat behind the wheel with the tank being filled. Those were indeed the “Golden Days of Driving,” even given the wage differential. For anyone old enough to remember, it was driving heaven!

Last weekend, I was briefly in Vancouver. (I think you know where this is going.)

And yes, I saw regular gas selling for $1.68-a-litre, and if you can believe Jason Kenney, at $1.70-a-litre at other stations where you have to pump it yourself in the rain. Not funny! But should this result in a “gas war” between B.C. and Alberta as Kenney so gleefully predicts while he threatens to close the taps and has passed legislation to do it?

A bit much, don’t you think?

But you’re lying to yourself if you think for one nanosecond that all the hypocrisy on this issue lies on the Alberta side of the Rockies. If anything, the hypocrisy flows more deeply down Granville Street, trendy Kitsilano and pricy West Vancouver where detached homes sell for up to $5 million or more, sometimes much more.

These are the places, the blue-collar East Side included, where the only dirtier word than “pipeline” is oil tanker, those mighty leviathans of the sea that bring most of the precious refined gasoline to the Left Coast and into the thirsty tanks of Vancouver’s SUVs.

It ain’t magic folks. The gasoline gets to Vancouver one way or the other. And of all the oil transportation methods available, pipelines are unquestionably the safest and lowest threat to the environment.

So, who are the biggest hypocrites in this senseless debate? The oil workers and companies of Alberta that only want to make an honest dollar selling the precious product that the Creator blessed them with? Or the holier-than-thou environmental purists of the Lower Mainland, who dearly love their gas-guzzling machines and seem to believe their thirsty tanks are filled by magic or the tooth fairy?

You know the old cliché. You can’t have it both ways. Anyone willing to be honest has to concede that the main way our enormously rich civilization functions, is by moving yucky, gunky old oil from the well head to the refineries where it’s converted to the precious commodity that makes our obscenely rich civilization prosper and gives us a standard of living that precious few of us are willing to give up.

Those are the facts of life folks, like them or not.

Now, I don’t mind admitting I voted Green in the last election and will probably vote Green in the next one because I believe an unfettered, carbon-emitting, oil-based civilization will eventually kill us all by destroying the environment. We have to wean ourselves off oil or eventually kill the planet.

But we can’t do it overnight!

That’s why we have to allow at least one more oil pipeline to be constructed across B.C. And like or not, expanding the Trans Mountain Pipeline is the safest and least dangerous of all the oil transportation options available. So, let the damn thing be built! But also start building a soft-energy, solar, wind and geo-thermal civilization, which is our only salvation in the future.

And while you’re at it, tell Premiers John Horgan and Jason Kenney to stop playing silly-bugger politics with this issue and do what’s best for their constituents.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who still remembers with great fondness his 1964 Valiant.

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