‘This oil should have been in a pipeline’: Sask. environment minister weighs in on derailment

Saskatchewan’s environment minister is looking at Monday morning’s train derailment near Guernsey and subsequent blaze and saying that it shouldn’t have happened.

Dustin Duncan said the derailment just bolsters the provincial government’s position that pipeline capacity should be increased, because oil should be moved by pipeline.

“Rail line transportation is good for a lot of products and, for us, preferably that would be moving out things like our agricultural products and things like potash, and let’s leave oil to be moved out by pipeline,” Duncan said Wednesday.

According to Duncan, there are many products that need to moved out of Saskatchewan that are good on the rail lines — potash and agricultural products — but oil has another option in pipelines.

“(We) can’t move canola to the west coast in a pipeline,” he said. “We’re not moving potash from Saskatchewan to ports of destination through pipeline — they have to be moved by rail.

“We can only truck so much, (so) rail is the most effective way to move those products. With oil, we have options. We can truck it out, we can move it by rail line, or we can get it out by pipeline. And this is just another example of why this oil should have been in a pipeline.”

He said his government will use what happened this week to bolster its arguments with the federal government on pipeline capacity.

Duncan said the situation is also frustrating.

“After what happened in Lac Megantic not that many years ago, that in and of itself should have been all the argument that anybody should have needed to see the need for additional pipeline capacity in Canada,” he said.

When it comes to safety on the rails, Duncan said that’s in the federal government’s hands and the province’s expectation is that the work on that issue will be done. But he said the province will do what it can to respond to incidents when they happen.

Duncan said that every time something like this happens, it means that we need to be more vigilant and do what we can to minimize the impact. It also means that if there’s another way to transport products, then we need to go to those avenues as much as possible.