OTTAWA - Canada will continue to produce oil and ship it across the country whether or not new pipelines are built, says the minister of natural resources says.
Building pipelines just means it can be shipped more safely, Jim Carr says in a recent interview with The Canadian Press.
Next week, Carr will play host to a major conference in Winnipeg looking at how Canada can and will adjust to a low-carbon energy world.
However, he says, even as Canada adapts to that new world, oil resources will be extracted and will continue to be shipped.
Getting more oil to the West Coast so it can be loaded on tankers and sold to China will be better for the country and getting it there on pipelines rather than rail cars is better for everyone, he says.
The federal government's approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline is under a legal microscope this week as Indigenous and environmental groups and British Columbia cities argue the process was incomplete and failed to take into account the impact the pipeline could have on everything from killer whales to waterways.
