The Tankers Are Already Here: What Are We Breathing?

 

The Tankers Are Already Here — Part 2  

If Canada Wants B.C.’s Coast, It Should Pay the Full Price

Canada is talking again about moving more oil to the Pacific.

Before British Columbians are asked to accept another pipeline, larger tankers or another major expansion of oil exports, we should finish the accounting on the system we already have.

The tankers are already here. The pollution is already measurable. The health science already exists. And perhaps most surprisingly, other jurisdictions have already shown that a government does not have to give away access to its land and coast for pennies on the barrel.

There is an old lesson from business that applies here: being the cheapest is not necessarily good business. In business, if what you provide is valuable, difficult to replace and comes with risk, you charge accordingly. You do not apologize for your price. You do not undercut yourself simply because the customer promises more volume. You charge enough to provide the service properly, protect yourself when things go wrong and put something aside for the future.

British Columbia should treat access to its Pacific coast exactly the same way.

Canada needs B.C. if it wants to move large volumes of Alberta oil to overseas markets. The pipeline crosses our province. The export terminal is in Burnaby. The tankers enter Burrard Inlet. Tugs assist them. Ships may wait at anchor. They travel through the Salish Sea and along our coast.

British Columbians carry part of the air-pollution burden. We carry the emergency-response burden. We carry the marine spill risk. We carry the coastal and ecological risk. And if those emissions make people sick, British Columbians and our health-care system carry that burden too.

That access has a price.

British Columbia should receive no less per barrel than Cameroon receives for providing pipeline transit.

Not half. Not one-tenth. Not whatever happens to be left after somebody counts jobs and taxes.

At least the Cameroon rate.

And because B.C. also provides Canada's Pacific marine-export doorway beside major population centres and one of the most ecologically important inland seas in North America, there is a strong argument that our price should be higher.

Start with what B.C. is getting now

During 2025, the expanded Trans Mountain system moved roughly 278 million barrels of petroleum.

About 168 million barrels were delivered to the Westridge Marine Terminal for marine export.

British Columbia's agreement with Trans Mountain provides a provincial payment of roughly $25 million to $50 million a year.

Spread across Trans Mountain's 2025 throughput, that amounts to roughly 9 to 18 cents per barrel.

If we generously assigned the entire provincial payment only to the oil reaching Westridge, the number would still be only around 15 to 30 cents per marine-export barrel.

That second calculation is not the legal payment formula. It is simply a way of showing the scale of what B.C. is receiving compared with the volume creating the coastal and marine burden.

Now look at Cameroon.

Cameroon provides the transit corridor and Atlantic export route for oil transported through the Chad-Cameroon pipeline.

Cameroon's published 2023 transit rate was approximately US$1.32 to US$1.36 per barrel.

Our ledger converts that to roughly C$1.82 to C$1.88 per barrel using the exchange-rate assumption applied in the comparison.

At 2025 Trans Mountain volumes, applying that benchmark to the whole system produces roughly $506 million to $521 million a year.

Apply it only to the oil shipped through Westridge and it still produces approximately $305 million to $314 million a year.

B.C.'s present direct payment? $25 million to $50 million.

That is not a small negotiating difference. At whole-system throughput, the Cameroon benchmark is roughly ten to twenty times the scale of B.C.'s current direct payment.

Yes — Cameroon should be the floor

We should be clear about what we are saying.

Our position is that British Columbia is entitled, as a matter of fair commercial treatment and public policy, to no less than the demonstrated Cameroon benchmark if Canada wants to use this province as its Pacific petroleum-export corridor.

Cameroon proved that petroleum producers will pay a jurisdiction a meaningful price for access. That is the important part. It establishes a market benchmark.

And B.C. provides something arguably more valuable. We provide Canada's primary large-volume Pacific petroleum outlet. We provide access to Asian markets. We provide the terminal. We provide the marine corridor.

And the risk does not stop when the oil reaches Burnaby. At that point, part of the risk changes from pipeline risk into tanker risk.

That is why Cameroon should be the starting price, not the maximum price.

A business with a premium product charges a premium price. B.C.'s coastline is a premium asset. The Salish Sea is a premium asset. Pacific market access is a premium asset. We should stop pricing them like a bargain-bin commodity.

Jobs and taxes are not payment for using our coast

This is another trick that needs to end.

When governments describe the benefits of a major project they often pile everything together: jobs, wages, GDP, property taxes, corporate taxes, provincial taxes and municipal taxes. Then they present one enormous number and call it the benefit.

But these things are not interchangeable.

If somebody working at Trans Mountain earns a wage, that is income to the worker. It is not a transit payment to British Columbia.

GDP measures economic activity. GDP is not money sitting in the provincial bank account.

Property taxes are ordinary taxes paid by businesses that operate in municipalities. Those taxes are not compensation for putting millions of barrels of oil through B.C.'s coastal environment.

Our existing ledger estimates a narrow B.C. public-finance benefit of roughly $88.7 million to $113.7 million a year when forecast provincial and local taxes are combined with the provincial Trans Mountain payment. The figures are screening values, not an audited statement of actual 2025 receipts.

That money matters. But it should remain separate from the price of providing the export corridor.

A proper ledger should have separate lines for ordinary taxes, host/transit compensation, health costs, marine risk, spill liability and environmental protection. Only then do we know whether B.C. is actually getting a good deal.

Now picture the tanker as an industrial plant that moves

Most people have never stood beside a ship's engine room. Numbers such as grams per kilowatt-hour do not mean much to the average person. Cars and trucks do.

California has spent years studying pollution from ocean-going ships because major ports sit beside millions of people.

The California Air Resources Board — CARB — does not treat a tanker sitting at a dock as though it has stopped producing pollution. It treats it as what it really is: a large industrial combustion source sitting beside a community.

A tanker can shut down its main propulsion engine at the berth and still require enormous amounts of power: lighting, pumps, ventilation, navigation equipment, electronics, heating and cooling, safety systems and cargo operations.

Unless the vessel connects to shore power or uses another approved control technology, much of that power comes from the ship's auxiliary diesel engines.

CARB's detailed ocean-going-vessel inventory assigns an Aframax tanker an effective auxiliary-engine load of approximately 724 kilowatts while at berth. Aframax is important because that is the general class of tanker commonly associated with existing Westridge crude exports.

CARB's regulatory baseline for an uncontrolled ocean-going auxiliary engine assumes approximately 13.8 grams of NOx per kilowatt-hour. It also assumes approximately 0.17 grams of PM2.5 per kilowatt-hour.

Now do the arithmetic. 724 kilowatts multiplied by 13.8 grams gives almost 10 kilograms of nitrogen oxides every hour from the auxiliary engines alone.

At the same load, the particulate calculation is approximately 123 grams of PM2.5 every hour.

Again: no main propulsion engine, no tugboats, no voyage through Burrard Inlet, no anchoring emissions, no terminal combustion equipment, no trucks servicing the terminal and no other tankers. Just the standardized CARB calculation for the auxiliary-engine load of one Aframax tanker sitting at a berth.

So how many cars is that?

Here is where the scale becomes easier to picture.

Environment and Climate Change Canada's latest published fleet-performance data show that the combined NMOG + NOx certification value for the Canadian 2024-model-year light-duty vehicle fleet averaged approximately 0.03186 grams per mile.

That number actually includes more than NOx, making the comparison below conservative.

Take one of those vehicles travelling at roughly 100 kilometres an hour. At that speed, its certification-rate NMOG + NOx output works out to roughly 2 grams an hour.

Compare that with the CARB uncontrolled tanker baseline: almost 10,000 grams of NOx an hour.

One CARB-baseline Aframax tanker sitting at berth represents roughly the NOx-rate scale of 5,000 current-model Canadian cars travelling continuously at 100 km/h.

Read that again: about 5,000 cars.

And because the car number includes both NMOG and NOx while the tanker number is NOx alone, we are not stacking the calculation against the tanker.

This is a regulatory comparison, not a claim that a particular tanker at Westridge was measured emitting exactly that amount. Different ships have different engines. Newer ships can be much cleaner than older ships. Operating loads vary.

But that is precisely why CARB created detailed emission factors by engine generation. Its at-berth distillate-fuel assumptions include approximately 13.8 g NOx/kWh for Tier 0, 12.2 for Tier 1, 10.5 for Tier 2 and 2.6 for Tier 3 auxiliary engines.

Even CARB's Tier 3 value, applied to the same 724-kW Aframax load, is around 1.9 kilograms of NOx per hour. Using the same modern Canadian car benchmark, that is still in the neighbourhood of 950 cars travelling continuously at highway speed.

That is the scale we are talking about.

What about pickups and larger trucks?

Canada's 2024 fleet data also allow another comparison.

The certification fleet average for Class 3 vehicles — the heavier end of pickups, vans and similar road vehicles — was approximately 0.248 grams per mile for NMOG + NOx.

At 100 km/h, that works out to roughly 15 grams an hour.

Against CARB's approximately 10-kilogram-per-hour Aframax baseline, you are looking at the emissions-rate scale of roughly 650 current-model Class 3 road vehicles running simultaneously at highway speed.

Again, that comparison is auxiliary engines alone. It does not turn the tanker into a car or a truck. It simply lets ordinary people understand the size of the combustion source.

California regulates trucks far more tightly per unit of engine work

There is another comparison that tells us just how different marine and road diesel regulation can be.

California's standard for many new 2024-2026 heavy-duty highway diesel engines is approximately 0.05 grams of NOx per brake horsepower-hour. Converted to the same kilowatt-hour unit used for ships, that is around 0.067 grams per kilowatt-hour.

CARB's uncontrolled ocean-going auxiliary-engine baseline is 13.8 grams per kilowatt-hour.

On a simple power-normalized basis, that marine baseline is more than 200 times the California 2024-2026 heavy-duty highway-engine standard.

Canada and the United States historically used a 0.20 g/bhp-hr standard for modern heavy-duty road diesels, equivalent to about 0.27 g/kWh. Even against that less stringent highway benchmark, CARB's ship baseline is roughly 50 times higher per unit of engine work.

These are different engine classes with different duty cycles and certification tests, so nobody should pretend it is a perfect apples-to-apples emissions inventory.

But the comparison tells the average reader something important: we have spent decades forcing cars and trucks to become dramatically cleaner while allowing very large marine engines to operate under a different regulatory framework.

California decided that was no longer good enough

This is why California matters so much to this discussion.

California did not simply say: 'The ship met the engine standard when it was built, so there is nothing more we can do.' California looked at the pollution reaching actual communities.

Its updated Ocean-Going Vessels At-Berth Regulation includes tankers. The regulation requires qualifying ships at regulated ports and terminals to use shore power or another CARB-approved emission-control strategy.

To qualify, an approved control system for auxiliary engines generally has to bring emissions below approximately 2.8 g/kWh NOx, 0.03 g/kWh PM2.5 and 0.1 g/kWh reactive organic gases. That represents roughly an 80 per cent reduction from CARB's uncontrolled baseline for major pollutants.

California's rule began extending to tanker visits at Los Angeles and Long Beach in 2025, with Northern California tanker requirements following in 2027.

California also found that tankers were not a minor part of the problem. CARB estimated that tankers represented about 50 per cent of statewide PM2.5 emissions from vessels at berth in its 2020 baseline analysis.

That fact alone should get our attention in British Columbia.

California put a price on cleaning it up

Here is the business lesson.

CARB estimated that its updated at-berth regulation would cost industry approximately US$2.23 billion through 2032.

That sounds enormous until you look at the other side of the ledger.

California estimated approximately US$2.32 billion in avoided health damages.

The regulation was expected to prevent roughly 240 premature deaths by 2032. It was also expected to substantially reduce hospital admissions, emergency-room visits and cancer risk around major ports.

Once fully implemented, CARB projected about a 90 per cent reduction in pollution from the covered at-berth sources and approximately a 55 per cent reduction in potential cancer risk in communities around certain major ports.

And what did CARB estimate this enormous pollution-control program would add to the cost of petroleum? For tankers, CARB calculated the 2030 cost at less than one cent per gallon of finished product.

Less than a penny.

That is the business case in one number.

Strict environmental protection does not automatically destroy an industry. Sometimes it simply forces the industry to include the real cost of doing business in the price of its product.

Canada does have marine rules — but they are not the same thing

Canada is not doing nothing. That needs to be stated accurately.

Inside the North American Emission Control Area, marine fuel sulphur has been limited to 0.10 per cent since 2015.

Canada also implements IMO nitrogen-oxide standards. For many new marine diesel engines over 130 kW installed on qualifying vessels operating in Canadian waters south of 60°N, Tier III NOx requirements have applied since 2016.

Those are real improvements.

But Canada and California are regulating two different things.

Canada's system is heavily based on fuel quality, engine age, engine certification and gradual fleet turnover.

California asks another question: how much pollution is this ship producing while it is sitting beside people right now?

That is why California's rule reaches the actual port visit and can require shore power or equivalent controls.

Older ships do not magically become harmless because they complied with the rules that existed when they were built.

And this is where health stops being an abstract number

I want to make one thing personal.

I have watched someone in my own family die from asthma.

Anyone who has witnessed a severe asthma attack understands why the words 'respiratory illness' do not come close to describing it.

Watching somebody you love fight desperately for every breath — and watching that fight fail — is one of the most horrible things a family can witness.

In the families I know, asthma is not some distant medical statistic. It is inhalers. Emergency rooms. Parents listening to children breathe at night. People avoiding smoke. People checking the Air Quality Health Index before going outside. It is fear. And sometimes it is death.

That personal experience is not scientific evidence. But the science exists separately — and it tells us very clearly that air pollution matters.

Asthma is already increasing in British Columbia

B.C.'s own medical guideline says asthma prevalence has increased steadily over the last two decades.

In 2001/02, approximately 8 per cent of British Columbians had asthma.

By 2021/22 the figure was 12 per cent.

That is a 50 per cent increase in prevalence over that period.

That does not mean Trans Mountain caused the increase. It does not mean air pollution is the only cause. Asthma involves genetics, allergies, infections, occupational exposures, smoke, wildfire conditions and numerous other factors.

But B.C.'s own guideline lists poor air quality as a risk factor. And Health Canada's conclusions about pollution are even stronger.

Health Canada says pollution can cause asthma and premature death

Health Canada has concluded that traffic-related air pollution causes premature death; causes the development and worsening of asthma symptoms in children; likely reduces lung function; and causes other serious health effects.

Health Canada's detailed asthma assessment found sufficient evidence of a causal relationship between traffic-related air pollution and asthma incidence and prevalence in children.

Its nitrogen-dioxide assessment found a causal relationship between short-term ambient NO2 exposure at current levels and increased asthma-related illness, including airway inflammation, increased respiratory symptoms, asthma hospitalizations and emergency-room visits.

That matters because NOx is one of the major pollutants produced by diesel combustion and marine engines. It is not some hypothetical substance that only matters at extreme concentrations.

Health Canada can even tell us how risk changes

Health Canada's AQBAT health-impact methodology uses concentration-response relationships from epidemiological studies.

One example in Health Canada's traffic-pollution assessment is striking: a 10 microgram-per-cubic-metre increase in long-term PM2.5 exposure corresponds in the AQBAT methodology to roughly a 10 per cent increase in the risk of premature non-accidental mortality.

That does not mean every individual has a 10 per cent chance of dying. It means population risk rises measurably as exposure rises.

That is why the phrase 'It's below the regulatory limit' does not mean 'It is harmless.'

Air pollution is already killing people in B.C.

Health Canada's 2024 report using 2018 conditions estimated that above-background PM2.5, ozone and NO2 pollution contributed to approximately 2,400 premature deaths per year in British Columbia.

That was approximately 51 premature deaths per 100,000 people.

Health Canada valued the B.C. health burden at approximately $19.3 billion in 2020 dollars. PM2.5 accounted for the largest share of the estimated deaths.

These are province-wide numbers. They are not Trans Mountain deaths.

Wildfire smoke is an important contributor in parts of B.C., and Health Canada specifically recognizes that in its analysis.

But that is not an argument for allowing more controllable pollution. It is the opposite.

If British Columbians are already living with wildfire smoke and other unavoidable or difficult-to-control pollution sources, then governments have an even stronger reason to reduce the pollution sources we can control.

Health Canada's traffic numbers put this into perspective

Across Canada, Health Canada estimates traffic-related air pollution contributes each year to approximately 1,200 premature deaths and roughly 210,000 asthma symptom days.

It estimates about 2.7 million acute respiratory symptom days annually.

The socioeconomic health burden was estimated at about $9.5 billion per year in 2015 dollars.

Again, these are road-traffic numbers. They are not tanker numbers.

But they demonstrate that governments already accept the basic science: combustion pollution has measurable human and economic costs.

So why would we refuse to calculate those same types of costs when the combustion source happens to be floating?

What is actually being measured at Westridge?

This is no longer just modelling.

Trans Mountain has a permanent monitoring station at Westridge.

It measures PM2.5, NOx, NO2, sulphur dioxide, ozone, BTEX compounds, black carbon, diesel particulate matter, and meteorological conditions including wind direction and speed.

The 2025 annual report said overall conditions complied with the applicable annual ambient objectives. That is important. But look deeper.

The annual PM2.5 mean was 4.9 micrograms per cubic metre.

The World Health Organization's annual health guideline is 5 micrograms per cubic metre.

So Westridge's annual average was already very close to the WHO health guideline.

The 2025 annual NO2 mean was approximately 10.6 parts per billion, below Metro Vancouver's annual objective of 12 ppb.

But WHO recommends an annual NO2 guideline of 10 micrograms per cubic metre, a substantially more protective health benchmark.

Again, that does not mean Westridge caused all the pollution measured at the station. The report itself identifies roads, other industrial operations and regional sources around Burrard Inlet.

But that is precisely why we need proper source attribution rather than simply averaging everything together.

Then there was the December diesel spike

The 2025 Westridge report contains another number ordinary people deserve to see.

The highest one-hour black-carbon concentration recorded during the year was 8,903.8 nanograms per cubic metre.

The highest one-hour diesel-particulate-matter concentration was 9,607 nanograms per cubic metre.

Both were recorded in December 2025.

The annual mean DPM concentration was approximately 601 nanograms per cubic metre.

That means the highest one-hour diesel-particle reading was about 16 times the annual average.

And here is another important fact directly from the report: there is no current ambient air-quality objective for black carbon or diesel particulate matter at Westridge.

So when somebody says the facility 'met the standards,' remember: for two of the pollutants we are particularly interested in — black carbon and DPM — there is no numerical ambient objective there to meet.

What caused that spike?

We do not know. And we should.

We are not going to pretend a tanker caused it without evidence.

But the answer should not remain unknowable.

The station has wind direction. We have vessel movements. We can obtain tanker arrival and departure times. We can obtain tug movements. We can compare surrounding regional monitoring stations.

We should be able to determine whether major pollution events occur when the wind is blowing from tanker berths, terminal equipment, nearby roads or other industrial sources.

That is what proper environmental monitoring is supposed to accomplish.

A pollution monitor should not just tell us 'Something happened.' It should help answer: 'Who caused it?'

Federal scientists warned about marine emissions before expansion

This concern is not new.

During the Trans Mountain regulatory proceedings, Environment Canada raised serious concerns about the project's marine-emission estimates.

Evidence cited in the NEB record said marine-source NOx emissions may have been underestimated by approximately 750 tonnes per year — about 37 per cent.

Environment Canada estimated that project-related marine NOx could represent around 7 per cent of total NOx emissions from all Canadian Lower Fraser Valley sources in the comparison year.

The federal review also questioned the assumptions used for tanker anchoring.

Trans Mountain had used an average of roughly 20 hours. Environment Canada looked at vessel data and found a Westridge-bound tanker could spend an average closer to 70 hours at anchor.

That is 3.5 times the assumption used for estimating anchorage emissions.

Environment Canada also identified omitted tanker boiler emissions, potentially adding another 10 to 30 per cent to some marine-emission estimates.

These warnings existed before the expansion opened. The expansion is operating now. So now we should test the modelling against reality.

We already have the tool to calculate the health cost

Health Canada has a program called AQBAT — the Air Quality Benefits Assessment Tool.

It is designed to take changes in PM2.5, NO2 and ozone exposure and translate them into estimated health outcomes: premature deaths, hospital admissions, emergency-room visits, asthma symptom days, respiratory symptoms and economic values.

We do not need to invent a new science.

We need to determine the Trans Mountain contribution to the pollution people are breathing and put that number into the machinery Canada already uses.

Then tell British Columbians the answer.

It would not take much health damage to erase B.C.'s financial return

Remember our narrow public-finance estimate: $88.7 million to $113.7 million a year.

That includes forecast provincial and local taxes plus the B.C. Trans Mountain payment. It does not represent every possible benefit. But it gives us a useful screening range.

Health Canada's mortality-risk valuation used in our ledger works out to roughly $9.6 million per mortality-risk equivalent after the inflation adjustment used in the project.

That means B.C.'s entire narrow annual public-finance benefit is roughly equivalent to only 9 to 12 Health Canada mortality-risk equivalents.

That is not a claim that Trans Mountain kills nine to twelve British Columbians every year. It is a break-even calculation.

If a proper AQBAT analysis eventually finds that the total annual Trans Mountain-attributable air-pollution health burden exceeds approximately $89 million to $114 million, then the narrow public-finance benefit has effectively been consumed by the health burden alone.

And that calculation still leaves out major spill risk, marine habitat damage, fisheries impacts, underwater noise, coastal contamination, climate damages, emergency-response liabilities and long-term ecological restoration.

This is why we are not here to defend the oil industry

The oil industry has people whose job is to defend it: lawyers, economists, lobbyists, public-relations firms and consultants.

Governments should not be doing that job for them. And environmental organizations certainly should not be doing it.

Our job is to ask whether the public is being properly protected and properly compensated.

If the project is genuinely profitable after paying the full cost of doing business, it will survive.

If paying for pollution control, health protection, environmental monitoring and marine liability makes the project uneconomic, then the public has learned something very important: the project may only have looked profitable because somebody else was paying part of the bill.

That somebody else is often the public.

We will not accept 'good for business' as an excuse for weak enforcement

British Columbia should not accept the old argument — whether it comes from Alberta, Ontario, Ottawa or anywhere else — that strong environmental enforcement somehow makes us anti-business.

California proves otherwise.

California has enormous ports. It has oil refineries. It has tanker traffic. It has one of the largest economies on Earth. And it still told the shipping industry: clean up the pollution at the dock.

CARB calculated the cost. CARB calculated the health benefit.

And the cost of the tanker regulation translated to less than a penny per gallon of finished petroleum product.

That is what competent regulation looks like.

It does not shut its eyes because an industry is economically important. The more economically important and potentially damaging the industry is, the stronger the accounting should be.

So what should British Columbia demand?

• No less than the Cameroon transit rate. At least the equivalent of US$1.32 to US$1.36 per barrel, adjusted appropriately over time. At current Trans Mountain volumes that puts the negotiating scale around half a billion Canadian dollars annually.

• A separate B.C. marine-risk premium. Tanker traffic, anchoring, tug operations, Burrard Inlet, the Salish Sea, spill response, fisheries and coastal ecological risk should not disappear inside the basic pipeline payment.

• California-level or better at-berth controls. Shore power or equivalent verified emission controls should become the expectation for tankers using a major urban petroleum terminal.

• Tugboat controls too. There is little sense cleaning the tanker while ignoring the diesel vessels assisting it.

• Continuous, independent source attribution. When black carbon, DPM or NOx spikes, the public should know whether the source was a tanker, tug, terminal operation, road traffic, wildfire smoke or another industry.

• A yearly Health Canada AQBAT ledger. Tell British Columbians how many asthma symptom days, hospital visits, emergency-room visits and premature deaths are attributable to the project and what they cost.

• A permanent B.C. health and environmental trust. Do not spend every petroleum dollar as it arrives. Put a substantial share aside so communities and ecosystems retain an asset after the oil stops flowing.

• A fully funded spill and restoration reserve. A major accident should never leave taxpayers arguing years later over who is going to pay.

• Full public accounting. Publish barrels moved, host payments, provincial taxes, municipal taxes, health costs, monitoring costs, spill reserves and environmental expenditures on one annual page.

• No double counting. Jobs are jobs. Wages are wages. Taxes are taxes. Host compensation is host compensation. Keep them separate.

Think like a business

If somebody needs access to something you own, negotiate.

If the thing is scarce, charge accordingly.

If providing it puts your property at risk, require insurance.

If it creates pollution, require controls.

If it creates future liabilities, demand security today.

And if competitors elsewhere have demonstrated that customers will pay substantially more, why would you volunteer to be cheaper?

That is not smart business.

British Columbia is providing access to an irreplaceable asset. There is only one British Columbia coast. There is only one Salish Sea. There is no substitute Pacific route through Saskatchewan.

Canada needs us more than our current agreement suggests. We should negotiate accordingly.

Before another pipeline, finish the accounting on this one

The most important thing about the existing Trans Mountain system is that we no longer have to argue entirely from forecasts.

The system is operating. The tankers are moving. The monitors are running. Now we can measure.

Match tanker arrivals to pollution. Match departures. Match tug movements. Match wind direction. Identify combustion spikes. Run the AQBAT analysis. Calculate the asthma burden. Calculate hospital visits. Calculate premature mortality. Calculate what B.C. is receiving. Calculate what B.C. is spending.

Then put the two columns beside each other: benefits and costs.

That is the ledger British Columbians deserve before anybody asks us to take another barrel.

The question is no longer whether oil exports make money

Of course oil exports make money.

The important question is: who makes the money — and who carries the bill?

Right now British Columbia provides Canada's Pacific petroleum-export doorway.

Cameroon demonstrates that a host jurisdiction can charge a substantial per-barrel price for access.

California demonstrates that tanker pollution can be regulated much more aggressively.

Health Canada demonstrates that air pollution causes premature death and contributes to asthma and other disease.

B.C.'s own health data show asthma prevalence increasing from roughly 8 per cent to 12 per cent in two decades.

Health Canada estimates approximately 2,400 premature deaths a year in B.C. are associated with above-background air pollution.

At Westridge we have already measured major short-duration black-carbon and diesel-particulate events, yet we still cannot publicly identify the source of the largest event.

And for black carbon and diesel particulate matter, there is not even a numerical ambient air-quality objective against which Westridge is judged.

So no — this is not the time for British Columbia to volunteer to be cheap.

At least the Cameroon price.

Plus the marine-risk premium.

Plus California-level pollution protection.

Plus the health monitoring.

Plus the spill security.

Plus a permanent public trust.

That is not anti-oil. It is not anti-Alberta. It is not anti-business. And it is not an endorsement of another pipeline.

It is simply saying that if Canada chooses to use British Columbia's land, communities, air and coast to make money exporting oil, British Columbians should not be left carrying the health and environmental risk for bargain-basement compensation.

The tankers are already here.

Before Canada sends us more of them, we should finally find out what the ones we already have are costing us.

And then we should send the bill.

Key source references used in the article

• California Air Resources Board (CARB), Ocean-Going Vessels At-Berth Regulation and emissions inventory materials: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/

• Environment and Climate Change Canada, 2024 model-year light-duty fleet pollutant performance: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/

• Health Canada, traffic-related air pollution, AQBAT and health-impact assessments: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/

• B.C. Guidelines, Asthma: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/practitioner-professional-resources/bc-guidelines/asthma

• Trans Mountain / RWDI, 2025 Westridge Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Report: https://docs.transmountain.com/Environment/20260325-RWDI-2602729-REP-AmbientMonitoring-TransMountainWestridge-2025.pdf

• West Coast Oil Pipeline Health Ledger project files: Cameroon benchmark, Westridge attribution, progressive ship-air standards sensitivity and B.C. economic/health ledger.

Our Position on Heavy Industry

VOLWS has a long history of working with heavy industry. We are not anti-industry or anti-oil. Petroleum will remain necessary while Canada develops practical alternatives, and we support modern Canadian refining that creates Canadian jobs and benefits Canadians first.

What we question is exporting large volumes of unrefined heavy crude—and the associated pollution and environmental liability—to other countries. If Canada continues extracting these resources during the energy transition, we should refine more of them here under strong environmental standards, retain the economic value here, and take responsibility for our pollution rather than leaving another country and another generation with the cleanup.

The Tankers Are Already Here — Before Canada Adds Supertankers, B.C. Must Demand the Truth About What We Are Breathing

The Tankers Are Already Here — Part 2 If Canada Wants B.C.’s Coast, It Should Pay the Full Price