The Canada-New Zealand Fracking Connection

The Canada-New Zealand Fracking Connection by Damien Gillis, April 20, 2012, The Common Sense Canadian
I’m down in New Zealand at the moment, filming for a feature documentary involving the unconventional gas industry – particularly the increasingly controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” – which I’ve been working on for the past year with a fellow Canadian filmmaker. Why New Zealand? We came here to follow the main subject of our film, a young First Nations man from the heart of the Canadian (and one could argue global) fracking industry. Caleb Behn worked for a number of years as a lands manager for several First Nations, addressing both of the major shale gas plays in Northeast BC, where the two sides of his family come from – the Horn River Basin near Fort Nelson and the Montney Shale formation, which extends beneath communities like Hudson’s Hope, Dawson Creek and several hundred kilometres East across the Alberta border. … Maori and concerned citizens in New Zealand have been dealing with the oil and gas industry for a long time; but Caleb’s timing couldn’t have been more appropriate, as it is just in the past several years – and particularly the past few months – that fracking operations have really been ramping up. And the parallels between the two countries, as we have been learning quickly, are positively striking.