Canada is one of the world’s five largest energy producers and the principal source of the US energy imports. Canada is growing its petroleum production by through unconventional resources like synthetic crude oil and oil sands, also referred to the tar sands, according to a report of The U.S. Energy Information Administration in September 2012.

Canada’s tar sands is not crude oil, it is a hydrocarbon mixture of a heavy petroleum product, bitumen, with sand which became the biggest energy project in the world.

A proposed reversal of the flow of Enbridge’s 38-year old Line 9 pipeline  running under every major river in Southern Ontario will deliver highly-pressurized oil from Alberta to Montreal.

The National Energy Board (NEB) hearings on Line 9, saw anti-pipeline protesters escorted out of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Friday. Saturday morning’s scheduled final public hearings were also cancelled due to security concerns a bit before No Line 9 rally started.

“Aamjiwnaang wants to be a leader for other communities to move forward and assert their lives to lands and better health. We are working hard and I really hope that this Saturday rally will help us get come together and will be very positive.” said Aamjiwnaang First Nations activist Vanessa Grey at the “Pipelines and the Petrostate” event at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto the Thursday before the rally.

Driven by the tar sands issue, members of George Brown’s Environmental Justice Collective (EJC) joined the Saturday rally, protesting with other hundreds in the rain, chanting “People – not profit! Water – not oil!”  opposite the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

“The rally was specifically planned to protest Line 9,” EJC member Chris Bourque said. “The emergency call to action to support the Mi’kmaq in NB the day before at the NEB scared the board. They did not want any more publicity around the growing support against the pipeline, as well as the human rights violations these developments are committing. The NEB passes 99 per cent of the proposals that come before it. A lot of people would say the NEB is a sham, and wish to expose it as such.”

On Oct. 17, an early morning raid by heavily-armed Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who intended to dismantle a blockade in New Brunswick by the Elsipogtog First Nation to of SWN Resources’ seismic testing trucks, turned violent.  SWN Resources want to extract natural gas using a controversial technique known as “hydraulic fracking” where vast quantities of highly-pressurized water are pumped into the ground to widen cracks and release natural gas.

A confrontation with tear gas and rubber bullets ended with the arrest of Elsipogtog Chief Arren Sock and other council members, the arson of six police cars, and solidarity demonstrations across Canada.

“Protests like in NB have been happening for decades,” echoed EJC activist, and Student Association Aboriginal Constituency Rep. Coty Zachariah. “Instead of being portrayed as environmental heroes some media still makes them out to be terrorists on their own land. It’s time the media covered the real stories. Not just angry protesters.”

Speaking at the panel on Thursday, Grey said she experienced friends and relatives dying from cancer and other health issues, common in Aamjiwnaang: asthma, unbalanced gender and birth ratio, miscarriages, and began create awareness of such issues, caused by the fracking companies’ activity, across the country.

“I grew up going to lots of funerals and I had a black dress,” said Grey. “Knowing about cancer for a long time, I didn’t think it’s a big deal, when I was a kid.”

Michelle Barlond-Smith of Michigan, who experienced Enbridge’s 2010 Kalamazoo River tar sands spill, joining the conversation via Skype said, “People don’t understand that tar sand oil is not crude oil. Importing to other countries they call it tar sand oil for tax purposes, but if there is a spill they call it crude oil.” 

Barlond-Smith first uploaded the photos of the accident to the CNN ireport, before the media knew about the spill.     

In 2012 the NEB did an safety audit of Enbridge, identifying all of the problems that emerged in Kalamazoo, said guest speaker and award-winning journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk.

“This company was not taking care of the safety and integrity of its pipelines and its audit was not public. And it’s not into recently, in the last year when the NEB took a billion dollar spill for the board to become more transparent and to release these documents. As of June this year the board did not even have a mechanism for finding companies that were breaking the law. That is Canada!”

[slideshow gallery_id=”7″]