Fire pipeline bureaucrat

Fire pipeline bureaucrat
Opening Gateway hearing to 'anyone' — literally any person, any child, any foreign citizen — just a waste of time, money

Stephen Harper must fire Sheila Leggett.

Leggett is the bureaucrat chairing the government's review of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from the oilsands to the B.C. coast. That pipeline would create thousands of jobs and bring in $20 billion a year for Canada, based on today's oil prices.

It's a recession-buster, and it will open up Asian markets for us. It's as strategically important today as building the Canadian Pacific Railway was 130 years ago.

Leggett has been reviewing the project for two years already. Public hearings are set to start next month. But last week, Leggett announced she was going to add on an additional year for discussions. Just like that, this little environmental empress decided that thousands of jobs and billions of dollars will have to wait.

She's happy to explain why. There's a video of Leggett on her website.

"Our job is to make sure that everyone who wants to talk to us about this project has an opportunity to be heard," she says with a strange, 1,000-yard stare. "We'll take whatever time it takes to ensure that everybody's views are heard."

Foreign lobby groups like Greenpeace saw that bizarre video and responded with gusto — as of Friday, 4,453 people had typed in their names into Leggett's website, signing up for the right to make a presentation.

Her website allows anyone in the world — literally any person, any child, any foreign citizen — to simply type their name and address and get the right to testify before her panel.

It's as trivial as clicking "like" on a Facebook page. That's why Leggett needs another year. If another 40,000 people click on her website, will she delay things 10 years?

Skimming through the names is like reading petitions where wiseacres sign up as "I. P. Freely" or "John A. Macdonald." Much of it is just junk, to jam up the system.

The website allows people to write a comment. Many of them are word-for-word replicas of each other. It's a form letter campaign, arranged by professional environmental lobbyists. And it's working. The only question is whether Leggett is naive, incompetent or biased against the pipeline.

Some of the forms have been faxed in. They helpfully have the fax signature stamp at the top of the page, showing which foreign-funded lobby group is working to gin up names. Like the Sierra Club, which received a $909,000 contract from the U.S. Tides Foundation and their Canadian affiliate to gin up opposition to the "tar sands."

Those foreign billionaires are getting their money's worth — they've managed to delay the hearings by a year before they've even started.

Many of the names on the petition are real people, of course. One of the foreign interests that filled out the form is the oil company owned by the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. That company, called CITGO, wrote to Leggett, saying they don't want Canada to build a pipeline to the coast.

Leggett will listen with great empathy while a lobbyist for OPEC tells Canadians that we should not be able to sell our oil overseas.

So there are famous people. But there are unknowns, too. What will Jeanette Donato from New York have to say? What will Robert Coon from Chicago have to say? Who knows who these foreigners are? Leggett will soon. Because she's promised to listen to anyone.

She's Stephen Harper's bureaucrat, but she's taking direction from foreign meddlers. For "whatever time it takes."

What a fool. No court would permit such a gong show. And Leggett has court-like powers.

Last month, when Barack Obama delayed the Keystone XL pipeline from the oilsands to the U.S., Harper was appalled.

But Leggett was appointed by Harper. And she just pulled an Obama on our own country.

Leggett must be fired. Her job is not to listen to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. It's to make the best decision in Canada's interest.

Her Oprah-style hearings are unacceptable, and Harper should make that clear by sacking her.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY