West Coast Environmental Law reacts to federal marine safety announcement
VANCOUVER, BC, Coast Salish Territories – West Coast Environmental Law Association issued the following statement in response to the federal government’s announcement today regarding new marine safety initiatives:
Federal Transportation Minister Marc Garneau says the sinking of the tugboat Nathan E. Stewart shows that oil spill response resources on Canada’s West Coast are inadequate.
In a meeting with the leaders of the Heiltsuk Nation on Sunday, Mr. Garneau also promised he will deliver a promised ban on oil tanker traffic off British Columbia’s North Coast by the end of the year. In fact, an announcement on spill response is expected as early as Monday.
The ministerial panel appointed by the federal government to review the National Energy Board’s appraisal of the Trans Mountain pipeline proposal concluded its report last week without any recommendations.
Instead, the panel posed six troubling questions for the cabinet to consider before it rules on the controversial pipeline next month.
Ottawa had not wanted any recommendations from the panel, but rather sought a broad report that would allow the government to make its own unencumbered decision.
A three-person ministerial panel set up as a kind of complaints desk for the Trans Mountain pipeline project has submitted its final report to the Canadian government.
Federal ministers will find plenty of grievances about the pipeline and the National Energy Board (NEB) regulatory process that approved it in the 60-page report.
On November 30, 2016, a case will come before the Canadian Supreme Court that will have momentous and potentially global implications. In April 2016 the Canadian Supreme Court, which hears only 5 percent of referred cases, agreed to judge an appeal brought by the Inuit community of Clyde River, Nunavut, against a five-year plan to carry out seismic blasting in Baffin Bay. The people who live in Clyde River, situated on Baffin Island, use the waters and ice of the Bay for hunting, a central component of their culture and primary source of food.
The Inuit in the Canadian Arctic are engaged in a centuries-old fight to retain their culture and reestablish self-determination and genuine sovereignty. In particular, Inuit in the autonomous territory of Nunavut are resisting what American Indian studies scholar Daniel R. Wildcat has described as a "fourth removal attempt" of Indigenous people, coming on the heels of failed efforts at spatial, social and psycho-cultural deletion.
Nov 3, 2016 - The Canadian boss of a Texas multinational energy company promoting a major oil industry expansion project says he's not "smart enough" to say how much human activity is contributing to climate change.
U.S. President Barack Obama said this week the federal government is considering rerouting the controversial Dakota Access pipeline. This is big news.
The nearly $4-billion (U.S.) project has been enveloped by a protest that looks and feels a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the centre of the demonstrations are the Standing Rock Sioux, whose ancestral territory the pipeline crosses. They have been joined by activists from around the United States.
