Dear Sir:
Enbridge’s most recent promotional advertisement for Northern Gateway is both duplicitous and incompetent, though so subtly that few might notice.
The ad’s most important element is not the open question of how much benefit the project might deliver. Enbridge is trying to sell Gateway, so they will spin like a mad Maytag.
Enbridge’s spin doctors are cagey with the repeated and incorrect use of “will” in the titles for the various claims of possible benefit: “New jobs will be created”, “Local communities will have a brighter future”, and so on.
To use “will” means that the project has already been approved; since it has not been, the correct verb is “would”.
Small difference, you might say. But such choice subtly influences psychology and belief. State that it is so, and people will believe.
The incorrect use allows Enbridge to gloss over the far greater number of safer and better jobs that would be created were the bitumen refined in the already ruined oil sands lands.
Worse, “brighter future” whitewashes — blackwashes? — the risk to communities on the route and the coast, and the bleak future everywhere from global warming.
Enbridge, if asked, would deny global warming. To accept it would require reconsideration of the whole crazy oil sands bonanza.
No money for them in that.
Dr. David Heinimann,
Terrace, BC
