TVO under fire for pipeline app

Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO has come under fire for an app it’s offering that shows the bombing of a gas pipeline.

The TVO website provides a link to the game, called Pipe Trouble. Players build their own pipeline, taking economical and environmental factors into consideration. But the introductory video shows protesters, and then a gas line blowing up.

Premier Kathleen Wynne told reporters she needs more information about the game before she can decide what to do. “It sounds disturbing to me on the face of it so I’m going to, I’m going to ask the minister of education to have a conversation with TVO because I think there does need to be a question asked about that.”

Conservative MPP Vic Fedeli says it’s not appropriate. “I don’t think the taxpayer should be funding that type of approach. I did look at the website, I did see the TV Ontario logo there, the Ontario Media Development logo, the Ontario trillium logo there as a sponsor. The next logo was a link to the David Suzuki Foundation, that a portion of all monies raised from the sale of that app goes to the foundation. I thought that was an incredibly inappropriate use of taxpayers’ dollars, to first of all have that type of a website, secondly to link it to donations to other NGOs that receive other government funding.”

The TVO blog describes Pipe Trouble as a “companion ethical game” to a documentary that deals with local opposition to pipelines and the bombing of pipelines in Peace River, BC. It says the game uses “over-the-top satire to cleverly explore the two sides of the energy extraction debate.”