Face-offs over injustice

Standing on High Ground: Civil Disobedience on Burnaby Mountain 
edited by Rosemary Cornell, Adrienne Drobnies, and Tim Bray

Toronto: Between the Line Books, 2024
$29.95 / 9781771136631

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Would you get arrested to protect the environment from a pipeline? Would you base action on your religious faith, your heritage, your sense of injustice? In Standing on High Ground, edited by Greater Vancouver area activists Rosemary Cornell, Adrienne Drobnies, and Tim Bray, we meet people from many different traditions and backgrounds who stood up to the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX) for exactly those reasons.

Following a detailed synopsis of the problems that the pipeline could bring with it as it carries diluted bitumen (or dilbit) from the Alberta tar sands to the west coast, the book is divided into six parts. Each of them offers reasons for opposing the pipeline, now owned by the federal government in a controversial purchase from Kinder Morgan by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Doubtless, that decision is contributing to his deteriorating public image in the West as we head into an election year.

We hear first from the Indigenous community. This is appropriate since the TMX runs through First Nations territory on Burnaby Mountain near Vancouver. Each chapter gives readers a short biography, a narrative of the protester’s experience on being arrested for violating a court injunction, and finishing with an excerpt from a deferential but sincere court statement.

Jim Leyden is a watchman also known as Blackbear Warrior. He chose to guard the land from a traditional First Nations Watch House. “My story shows how we ran right into the legal face of racism and colonialism by engaging in resistance to this pipeline,” he writes.

He calls the court injunction that allowed the pipeline, despite numerous warnings of the dangers it represented, “institutionally endorsed tyranny.” This view is reflected in other chapters.

Several protesters were inspired by Presbyterian, Quaker, Buddhist, and Unitarian beliefs. Anglican priest Emelie Teresa Smith told Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Affleck that “we are to honour the Life Force of the Universe” and that colonizers did not respect that view. They “brought fear and power, greed and violence.”

Other protesters came from diverse backgrounds in academia and politics. Professors, medical doctors, environmental scientists, and public health educators stressed the dangers of a pipeline disaster and the disruptive intrusion on the land and the Salish Sea.

Software engineer Tim Bray is one of the book’s editors and a member of protest group called the Brunette River Six. He was protesting “the petroleum conspiracy” as well as the justice system that jails “yet another group of self-sacrificing people trying to throw themselves between TMX’s engine of destruction and the earth that sustains us.”

Still others expressed their resistance to the pipeline through their art. These included a spoken word poet, a sculptor, an actor, and two musicians. Two women dressed as T-Rex dinosaurs joined the protest. Emily Kelsall, one of the two, recited a T-Rex proverb to Supreme Court Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick while wearing her mask.

Her T-Rex companion, Métis community organizer Mary Laframboise, compares her resistance to that of Métis leader Louis Riel. Describing the TMX as “genocidal,” she argues as did others that the emphasis on the “rule of law in a colonial court on stolen land is a cruel and ironic hypocrisy.”

All the comments are impassioned statements anchored in respectfully submitted and often frustrated criticisms of a flawed governmental and judicial system. In the end, they did not stop the TMX, which began moving tar sands dilbit to the West Coast in May 2024. With that said, the editors conclude that protesters succeeded by thwarting emissions, reducing oil spills, pressuring government to deal with climate change, strengthening First Nations power, and creating a network of climate activists.

Standing is an honourable and compassionate compendium of heartfelt statements from people who were willing to go to jail for their beliefs. As such they could fairly be compared to others in history who broke laws in defiance of what they perceived as injustice. As much as I am in sympathy with many of the views expressed, I was disappointed to learn that it is not so much a book as a report from the environmental front line. As such it reads as a set of polemical arguments.

To their credit, the contributors are often passionate in their lengthy descriptions of both their land-defending role against TMX and their critique of the capitalist system’s damage to First Nations. But with limited editing in evidence, this is an over-long and at times tediously repetitive reading experience.

Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Derek Hayes, George Galt, David Lester and Marcus Rediker with Paul Buhle, David Spaner, Ken McGoogan, Dietrich Kalteis, Grant Lawrence, and Howard White for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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