A Story Left Untold: Canada's Absent Maritime Workers and the Wreck of the Nathan E. Stewart

CBC Daybreak North and a Neglected Issue of Vital Northern Concern

by Ingmar Lee - 10,000 Ton Tanker

January 13, 2017

Photo April Bencze Heiltsuk Nation

Andrew Kurjata, the writer of this piece works for CBC "Daybreak North." Over the past 4 years have repeatedly appealed to Daybreak North to cover the issue of the "Nathan E Stewart" and the implications of the American Alaska-bound tanker traffic that exploits the BC Inside Passage as a private petroleum conduit. 
 
Over the past 4 years I have repeatedly appealed to CBC "Daybreak North" to cover the issue of the "Nathan E Stewart" and the implications of the American Alaska-bound tanker traffic that exploits the BC Inside Passage as its petroleum conduit.

It was only after the wreck of the Nathan E Stewart that CBC Daybreak North began covering the issue, - albeit with a blatant, sanitized slant focused on talking points provided by the Texas-based Kirby Corporation that owned the tug, the Kinder Morgan- owned "clean-up" service, WCMRC which provided a chimera of "cleanup" operations in progress around the wreck, and by Big Oil government lackies, all of which was designed to sanitize and minimize the implications of the disaster.

CBC and Daybreak North never once sought to examine the outrageous Alaska-bound tanker business that conducts as many as 50 round trips up and down the BC Inside Passage annually. It did not notice the political wrench that the wreck of the Nathan E Stewart presented to Justin Trudeau's tightly-scheduled roll-out of pipeline/tanker announcements. Neither did CBC or Daybreak North examine the farcical, utterly hopeless, ineffectual, and impotent "clean-up" of the disgusting, poisonous, devastating, yet comparatively minuscule slick that spewed out of the wreck.

Initially, I approached CBC with polite, concise, factual reports about the tanker traffic, and how it operated, providing not a single Canadian job, -not even to Canadian pilots- paid no tarriff or fee, offered no stops in Canada, and carried on average, one quarter of the petroleum spill volume that was released into the sea by the Exxon Valdes, - on every trip! But they were not interested at all.

Daybreak North has consistently, unfailingly refused to give me any airtime on this issue. They have never returned my calls, or ever showed the slightest interest in this most serious clear and present danger that threatens the natural splendours of this coast. I challenge anyone to name a bigger threat.

CBC Daybreak North purports to cover "northern" issues, and although it runs a branch in Prince Rupert which purports to cover coastal issues, the station is based, managed and tightly controlled from Prince George, -which of course, is amongst the very few BC communities which remains transfixed in the thrall of Big Oil.

If I am being muzzled and blacklisted by Prince George CBC message-management, then I expect that they are also muzzling others amongst the vast majority of British Columbians who oppose, or are concerned about the Big Oil Assault on this province.

I believe that CBC Prince George harbours entrenched remnants of obsequious status-quo, business-as-usual conservative-slanted stenographer lackies that survived the Stephen Harper eviscerations of the CBC.