Just gave the article a second look. The government’s reaction makes a lot more sense in the context of the current debate about the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.
We know that the public generally does not care about marine incidents that don’t involve photos of oiled wildlife. Which partly explains the different reactions, but why no investigation? (AFAIK)
Here is from the article:
When the “Nathan E Stewart” sank in Seaforth Channel, the incident happened at a sensitive time during the Trudeau regimes’ carefully crafted roll-out of announcements designed to soften public opinion towards their pending approval of the Kinder Morgan bitumen pipeline project to the BC coast. As a result, more than $100 million is said to have been spent on removing the sunken wreck from the waters. During the 1 1/2 month salvage operation, virtually every asset of the Canadian Coast Guard made an appearance at the wreck site, as did numerous giant tugboats, barges, the entire fleet of the Kinder Morgan-owned “Western Canada Marine Response Corporation,” gargantuan floating heavy-lift cranes, teams of divers, Lear Jet loads of Texas oilmen, floating man-camps full of personnel, helicopters hovering continuously overhead.
Enormous crane barges brought up from Seattle. photo: Ingmar Lee
And what of the Jake Shearer disaster, which would have been orders of magnitude a much worse catastrophe than the Nathan E Stewart? The Jake Shearer, by sheer luck, did not spill any oil. Therefore it has been swept under the rug and forgotten. Whereas the Nathan E Stewart disaster prompted Transport Canada as well as American investigations, along with parades of federal government Ministers and dignitaries visiting Bella Bella, -all proffering the usual platitudes that “this can never be allowed to happen again, -with the Jake Shearer nothing at all. There has been no investigation. The Jake Shearers identical sistership ATB’s continue to threaten the BC Inside Passage, each equipped with the same “Articouple” locking pins which failed so dramatically. These ATB’s carry on with no conventional towing winch, and their working skiffs continue to be mounted on their barges.
In fact nothing whatsoever was learned and nothing whatsoever has changed.
I didn’t really pay this section any mind when I first read it but it does appear that the Canadian government doesn’t want any questions raised about oil transport by water.