Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said “if I thought there was a danger to the beautiful British Columbia coast, I would not have approved the Kinder Morgan pipeline.”
The thing is, I live on this coast, and the community members, Indigenous leaders, and even politicians that surround me don’t share Trudeau’s level of certainty. In fact, we’ve seen many scientific reports indicating that Kinder Morgan would be devastating for the Pacific.
Federal government officials spent two days denying the findings of a scientific paper exploring research into the effects of oilsands pollution in the ocean, a week before the Trudeau Liberals gave the green light to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to the west coast.
Indigenous consultation on environmental assessments that only considers the “significant adverse effects” of a project won’t bring about reconciliation.
n August 2016, the federal government established a panel of four specialists to review how government conducts environmental assessments on proposed projects with significant impact on the environment, such as energy and natural resources developments.
Liberals say they will also announce new protections for oceans, lakes and rivers
Feb 08, 2018
The federal Liberal government says it will streamline the approval process for major natural resources projects, scrapping the National Energy Board and empowering a new body to conduct more extensive consultation with groups affected by development.
The changes are part of the largest overhaul of Canada's environmental assessment process in a generation.
Lost in the heated arguments over Kinder Morgan's proposed Trans Mountain pipeline is this simple fact: more than a quarter of the bitumen flowing through it will end up as pollution spilling into our oceans — one way or the other.
All the bitumen that doesn't spill from pipelines or tankers gets burned, ending up as carbon pollution dumped into our environment. Over one quarter ends up in the oceans, acidifying them for millennia to come.
Canadian governments are sitting by and watching as endangered species disappear, in what one environmental lawyer calls a “slow moving catastrophe.”
The latest blow comes as a deadline for provinces to outline plans to protect threatened caribou habitat blew by without a single province meeting the deadline.
