Governments love buzzwords — probably because they roll off the tongue so nicely that people often overlook the fact they’re meaningless.
Take one of the B.C. government’s favourite expressions of late: “world leading” oil spill response.
It’s included not once, but twice, in B.C.’s five conditions for approval of oil pipelines — used to give the green light to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.
But what does “world leading” oil spill response actually mean?
“I see a lot of gaps in this wording of ‘world class’ response,” says Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist who was working as a commercial (Read more…) in Cordova, Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in March 1989, spilling more than 41 million litres of oil into Prince William Sound.