Pipeline reviews “contaminated by fraud from the get-go,” says May

Green Party leader Elizabeth May denounced National Energy Board (NEB) reviews of both the Energy East and Trans Mountain Pipeline proposals as frauds – and warned that Justin Trudeau faces a legal mess.

If approved, the Energy East pipeline will transport 1.1 million barrels of oil per day from Alberta and Saskatchewan oil sands to terminals on the Atlantic coast. The expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline will allow Kinder Morgan to transport another 890,000 barrels per day from Alberta to the West Coast, up from the current rate of 300,000 barrels per day.

Kinder Morgan's proposed route for its Trans Mountain twinning (company map).

“My view is that the National Energy Board process was contaminated by fraud from the get-go," said May at a press briefing in Ottawa's National Press Theatre on Nov. 19. She based her statement on the fact that Kinder Morgan submitted as evidence to the National Energy Board what they claimed was mathematical modelling for oil spill behaviour by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States— but that Kinder Morgan had falsified it by lining out the word "draft" on every page of the EPA report.

May also spoke about the Paris climate talks at the briefing.

Despite the potential legal quagmire, Justin Trudeau’s new Liberal government has chosen to press ahead with both NEB reviews first started by his predecessor Stephen Harper.

In doing so, the new prime minister broke a commitment made to B.C.’s Dogwood Initiative last August that all ongoing pipeline reviews would be halted as part of a complete overhaul of the NEB, which Harper stacked with pro-fossil fuel board members.

“It applies to existing projects, existing pipelines as well,” Trudeau said in a Dogwood Initiative videoposted in August. A representative asked him how he would handle Kinder Morgan’s proposed twinning of the Trans Mountain Pipeline stretching from Alberta to Burnaby in B.C.

Both the Trans Mountain and Energy East reviews as they stand are “quite illegitimate,” May said, during the press briefing.

Ideally, she said, the new Canadian government would start the process again and fix Canada’s environmental assessment laws that were gutted by Harper’s passage of omnibus bill C-38. Titled the Jobs, Growth, and Long-term Prosperity Act, the bill imposed stricter time limits on NEB reviews, as well as allowing its decisions to be reversed by the federal cabinet.