… and you’ll pay each of the teams for a ticket (at least if you’re wise).

(A big shout out to Dan Murphy, once of the Vancouver Province, now with Deep Rogue Ram, likely at least in part because his genius wasn’t welcome: it stated obvious and unpleasant truths.)

An item in the Globe and Mail from last night and this morning outlines how Ottawa (that is to say, our government) is preparing for the fight over the now-NEB-endorsed Northern Gateway pipeline. Those who have an inkling of the potential impact of this project, and others of the same ilk, as well as the drain it represents on the Canadian economy in favour of the international fossil fuel clique, will want to step up and throw something n the pot to ensure that it isn’t for lack of a dollar or two that we all get subjected to the degradation of the environment, the body politic, the real economy and the spirit that this project will represent.The sad part is that we will sure as hell be funding he Enbridge end of the fight, and, barring an election and a serious change of direction as well a government, we, the citizens of this once-fair land, will have no say in how deeply the government and its legions of lawyers and lobbyists will dip their oily hands in our collective pocket. Many of us have suspected since long before current revelations about CSEC doing industrial espionage in our name for the benefit of predatory mining and oil interests, that our elected government was very much in thrall to certain well-monied interest groups, but the current spate of moves on their behalf is so brazen as to defy any notion of conflict of interest. Not only to we pay exorbitant energy prices, we pay subsidies to entities that make huge profits and that are actively working to exacerbate the conditions that are likely to make our one planet uninhabitable. Makes great sense, does it not? When the long and largely abortive Treaty Process was at its height, there were many complaints about the money that taxpayers were furnishing to fight both sides of the case. In the true spirit of Catch-22, that user manual for modern society, we should expect that First Nations could have access to the same bottomless pit of legal tender offered to Enbridge, Kinder Morgan and the rest of their crew.