Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
It was right around the time a man walked up to me, leaned close to my face and asked how much I had been paid to write a story talking about the benefits of the Weyburn wind project that I had an epiphany:
I wasn’t standing in Weyburn’s McKenna Hall, reporting on an open house for a wind project.
I was actually standing in a townhall somewhere in Nebraska, listening to angry folks protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.
I was in Wisconsin, listening to the Native Americans demanding that a pipeline that crossed their territory over 60 years ago be shut down.
I was in Burnaby, watching Elizabeth May getting arrested protesting the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion.
I was at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, where every professional protester was camped, protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. They were proclaiming it was going to destroy, well, everything. (After several years in operation, the world had not yet ended.)
This was my personal introduction to the ugliness of NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard.
And it also exemplified the BANANA syndrome – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (alternatively: Near Anyone).
NIMBY and BANANA had reared their ugly head that week, and I was feeling some of the heat.
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I have written more about the questionable reliability of wind power generation than anyone else in this province over the last three years. If I averaged three stories a month – and it’s often been a lot more than that, I would have easily written at least 99 stories critical of wind.
But on Dec. 9 I published one, singular, highly detailed story taking the other side of the issue – talking about the benefits of what a wind project worth in the range of a third of a billion dollars, would mean to Weyburn.
Most people would say a 99 to 1 ratio would imply some sort of bias. But to the opponents of the Seven Stars Energy Project, the ones who plastered the project area with signs all over the place, my bias was clear. I must be a sellout.
How do I know this? Because their Facebook page said so. Part of a rather libellous comment on a link to my one positive wind story asked, “What was the price for this article?”
That comment was also made on my post broadcasting the article. While they retracted it after I demanded they do so, it was clear when talking to one of them they still meant it.
I had words with that man who walked up to me and accused me of being bought off. And I had words with the organizers of that Facebook page, too, immediately after the open house was over. How dare they question my integrity and sully my good name? I pay my mortgage because I have a reputation of being honest and truthful in all my reporting. Without that reputation, I’m dead in the water.
You see, the NIMBY disease and the BANANA syndrome immediately give rise to one of the cancers of our society today – cancel culture. The very second someone says something you no longer agree with – cancel them! Discredit them! Immediately! They are clearly irredeemable!
Two men that night stood less than a foot from my face and told me I had been bought off, clearly, because I had published a story that was of a different narrative.
I can assure you, I was not bought off.
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But that’s what happens. Everyone becomes tribal, closing their ears. Opponents to whatever project it is get up in arms, and will desperately search for anything to discredit that which they oppose, fear or don’t understand. We saw this in spades on both sides with COVID. It’s apparently everywhere.
Well, Weyburn had better think about this long and hard: You’re an oil town. An energy town. And you have been for nearly 70 years. I wrote a story a few years ago about how the Weyburn Unit has been running for so long, if it were a person, it would be collecting Canada Pension Plan cheques.
If what is going on with the wind project succeeds, what happens down the road with oil drilling? Can we see a day where you won’t be able to drill an oil well, because the neighbour didn’t like it? How about build a pipeline?
Because I can tell you what Weyburn will become – Canora. It’ll have a few large grain terminals on the edge of town, a few small businesses, and that’s about it. Next to no industry. Few services. Mostly old people, waiting to die. Not much else.
I know. I grew up near Canora. I’ll be buried there.
That’s what Weyburn will be, if nothing can be built there anymore. But it’ll have a big cemetery on the edge of town.
And if this is going to be the Saskatchewan model going forward, what happens when SaskPower gets serious about building nuclear reactors – first at Estevan, and then elsewhere? I’ve interviewed both Premier Scott Moe and SaskPower Minister Jeremy Harrison, including in recent days. Clearly, Saskatchewan is on the path to eventually building many reactors, in many places. What will happen then?
If you can’t build an energy project by Weyburn, where the hell can you build it in this province? Enbridge, a pipeline company, is bending over backwards. They’ve relocated a pile of the turbines to an area that’s got nothing but flat land and pumpjacks. I know. I drove throughout the project area, twice. They doubled the typical setbacks to 1,500 metres, a distance their own experts said were unheard of. They stretched the project timeline eight to 10 months in an effort to mollify opposition. At the open house, they were repeatedly apologizing for bringing a project worth around a third of a billion to that town.
Let me say that again – they apologized, repeatedly, hat in hand, because they dared to try to bring a massive energy project to an oil town.
Most communities would be leaping for joy to have any sort of investment, let alone a third of a billion dollars.
Does any of this change my thoughts on the reliability of wind on a macro scale? No. Does it change the body of work I’ve done documenting that? No. And I’ll keep writing about it.
But I’ve definitely had my eyes opened.
If people don’t want development, they might want to be careful what they wish for. They could very well get it.
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca.
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