No flies on them

On December 17th, crack environmental lawyer and justice minister Jerome! Kennedy told Dave Bartlett of the Telegram, speaking of Our Dear Infeed:

That’s something that we could start immediately, it’s something that we wouldn’t have to wait for the environmental assessments because essentially we’d simply be building a transmission line…

Simply a stinkin’ ol’ transmission line.

Who needs a stupid ol’ environmental assessment for a stinkin’ ol’ transmission line that’d only be 1200 kilometres long, and pass under twelve miles of iceberg infested waters, and would possibly pass through one national park, and would have electrodes stretching into the area under study for another national park, and which was estimated to cost a cool two billion dollars, and that was a decade and a half ago anyway.

Oh? We do? Huh? Uh, ok then, thanks for that.

On Friday, a mere 45 days after Jerome said we wouldn’t have to wait for the simple environmental assessments of a simple transmission line, NALCO(R) filed the documents to support its, um, environmental assessment of its simple transmission line.

There are megs and megs of files, and dozens and dozens of maps. And there are eight pages of regulatory hurdles – laws, regulations, justiceministery sort of stuff – that would have to be jumped.

What a truly astonishing feat of research on NALCO(R)’s part; putting together all of this granola-crunchin’ hippy nonsense just a month and a half after the justice minister signalled that we wouldn’t have to wait for it, because we’d simply be building a transmission line.

Simply a two-billion dollar, in mid-1990s dollars, transmission line.

No sweat. Nothing to it.