Crossing Lines

In Manitoba, a struggle to unite against Canada’s quiet pipeline.

- Josiah Neufeld

On a thawing evening in early March, around a hundred people crowd into a high-ceilinged church hall in Morden, Manitoba, a town known for hardworking Mennonite farmers and fossilized aquatic reptiles. Even before the Mennonite pastor introduces the evening’s discussion topic with a note of nervous humour — “What could possibly go wrong?” — a current of tension eddies under the small talk as people pour themselves black coffee and file past a table stacked with handbills urging them to “STOP the LINE 3 PIPELINE!”

In rural Manitoba, an issue that’s been underground for fifty years is coming to the surface. Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. has embarked on a $9 billion project to replace nearly all of Line 3, a deteriorating 1,765-kilometre pipeline that carries crude Oil from the Alberta oil sands across the prairies to a terminal in Superior, Wisconsin. In 2017, Enbridge began laying new pipeline alongside the old, which is to be drained and sealed off. The weakening, fifty-year-old pipeline has been operating at just over half its original capacity of 760,000 barrels per day since 2010, and critics stress that the replacement will nearly double the amount of crude flowing through Line 3 to US refineries.

In Canada and the United States, pipelines have become arenas for conflict, pitting environmental groups and Indigenous peoples against the oil-and-gas industry, with politicians caught in the middle. Like Thermopylae — the rocky coastal pass where Greek forces held off ten times the number of invading Persians — a pipeline offers a strategic bottleneck where relatively small groups can do battle with powerful energy corporations to impede the extraction of fossil fuels. Their strategies can be effective.