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.
Regulator’s management of fracking dams, release of timely information among concerns - Jan. 23, 2018
Investment in northeastern B.C.’s gas fields has soared in the last several years, thanks to the abundance of gas and liquids in the Montney formation and the promise of a new liquefied natural gas industry developing.
Jeakins said the commission’s annual budget of $50 million and staff of 250 have kept pace with the industry’s growth.
It's an oil spill the size of Paris. But only now is the world's attention catching up with the vast scale of the disaster in the East China Sea — the largest tanker spill in decades.
The crash itself happened weeks ago when an Iranian tanker called the Sanchi collided with a Chinese freighter on January 6 and burst into flames, later sinking. Thirty-two crew members are presumed dead.
Shortly before 4 p.m. on November 26, 2017, a U.S. barge carrying 3.5 million litres of diesel to Alaska broke free from its tugboat, the Jake Shearer, off the rocky shore of British Columbia’s Goose Island. Westerly winds were blowing at 45 knots while rain all but sandblasted the side of the barge, now anchored precariously in rough waters. The Canadian Coast Guard vessel deployed from Prince Rupert, approximately 300 kilometres away, wasn’t expected to reach the stranded barge until 7:30 p.m. at the earliest.
(Fort St. John, B.C., Treaty 8 Territory, Jan 16, 2018) – The West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations have filed notices of civil action alleging that the Site C hydroelectric project, together with the two previous dams on the Peace River, unjustifiably infringes their constitutional rights under Treaty 8, stating:
It has been a month now since the BC government announced that Site C would continue. The accounting rationale used by Premier Horgan makes absolutely no sense in light of the findings from the recent BCUC review, and the much greater financial woes of continuing the project.
