Energy East's new lease on life not enough, say opponents

The Energy East pipeline won’t be without its detractors after the federal regulator tried to wipe the slate clean on its troubled past today.

The National Energy Board (NEB) voided all decisions made by a review panel that had been overseeing TransCanada Corp.’s $15.7-billion pipeline project up until September of last year.

That three-person review panel, which held hearings in New Brunswick and made several key decisions on how TransCanada’s regulatory process would play out, recused itself in September.

The official reason was a conflict-of-interest scandal. Two panelists had met secretly with representatives from TransCanada, according to reports by the National Observer website.

But the decision came after the NEB had to abruptly shut down a hearing in Montreal on August 29 when demonstrators rushed the front of the hearing room.

Three new board members — Don Ferguson, Carole Malo and Marc Paquin — were officially named as the project’s new reviewers on January 9.

The defunct panel had made a number of big decisions, including a determination that TransCanada’s application was complete, as well as the list of participants, the list of issues and the hearing order.

None of those decisions apply any more, the NEB said today.

The panel’s previous deadlines don’t apply either, and a 21-month time limit that the regulatory process must obey is starting anew, the NEB said.

The panel was supposed to have sent the federal cabinet a recommendation on the pipeline by March 2018.

Environmental and indigenous opponents of Energy East — which would ship 1.1-million barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta to refineries in Quebec and New Brunswick — said starting fresh isn’t good enough.

Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr has asked an expert panel to examine how Ottawa can modernize the NEB, and opponents of the pipeline say the project should be regulated by those new rules.

The expert panel originally was supposed to give Carr a report by mid-February, but that deadline has been pushed to mid-May.

“There is no way that the new review should be allowed to go ahead under the old rules, which are being re-written as we speak to address the structural pro-industry bias introduced by the Harper government and to incorporate consideration of climate change impacts,” wrote Keith Stewart, who runs Greenpeace’s climate change campaigns.

The Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion, a coalition of indigenous groups opposed to the oilsands, said the NEB is still operating under broken rules.

“First Nations demanded Prime Minister Trudeau live up to his oft-repeated campaign promise to not approve pipelines until the NEB was overhauled,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, in a statement. “But as we saw, Trudeau chose to merely tinker and ‘modernize’ the NEB only after approving the Kinder Morgan and Line 3 pipelines.”

The federal Liberals approved Kinder Morgan’s expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline and Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 pipeline in November.

Carr’s office pointed out that Energy East, like Trans Mountain, will be regulated under an amended set of rules different from those left in place by the Conservative government.

“Canadians understand that the current environmental assessment and regulatory reviews, including the modernization of the NEB, will take time,” said Alexandre Deslongchamps, a spokesperson for Carr, in an email.

Energy East’s review will include more consultations with indigenous peoples, more public input and an assessment of upstream greenhouse gas emissions — all measures that the Liberals introduced in January 2016, said Deslongchamps.