Jameson Berkow

Reporter

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Justin Trudeau might have been wise to stay silent on pipelines thus far, but if the Prime Minister does not speak up about pipelines soon, he risks creating another market access quagmire.

On Thursday, the National Energy Board recommended approval of the $6.8-billion Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, subject to 157 conditions. The project, which involves laying 987km of new pipe from Edmonton to Vancouver alongside the original pipeline that has been operating since 1953, would nearly triple capacity of the line to 890,000 barrels per day.

Much like Keystone XL and Northern Gateway before it – and increasingly Energy East – Trans Mountain has become the subject of immense controversy. Thousands of protestors and the mayors of Burnaby and Vancouver have vehemently opposed the project, arguing it would dramatically increase the risk of spills and hasten the effects of climate change by allowing Alberta oil sands production room to expand. Proponents, meanwhile, point to the existing pipeline’s six decades of safe operations and the industry’s increasingly desperate need to fetch the higher prices available at tidewater ports.

In hopes of appeasing both sides, Ottawa amended rather than replaced the rules for pipeline reviews in late January, adding four months to the time cabinet will have to decide whether to accept or reject the NEB’s recommendation. The extra time, which pushes the deadline for a final decision from August 2016 to December, was intended for a government-appointed panel to weigh the broader environmental consequences of the project before the federal cabinet rules.

The three members of the panel were announced earlier this week. Assuming the panel is able to complete its ambitious task on time, here are just a few of the other ways the debate could drag on well past the end of this year.

Quibbling over conditions

Prior to 2012, the NEB held final authority over whether any given pipeline could or could not be built. After the Harper Conservatives’ “Jobs, Growth and Long Term Prosperity Act” became law in 2012, the regulatory body could only issue recommendations, with decision-making authority moving to cabinet. The new law also gave cabinet the ability to order the board to reconsider any of its conditions, including the ability to “specify a time limit” within which the regulator must prepare a new report. Ottawa has never ordered the NEB to review any of its conditions before, but the government has also never assembled a supplementary expert panel to dig deeper into a proposal before. Should cabinet decide to set a precedent this time around, it would be difficult to estimate what sort of delay any reconsideration will cause for the deadline.

British Columbia pipes up

Earlier this year, the B.C. Supreme Court ruled the province was free to conduct its own environmental review of the Trans Mountain proposal. A so-called “equivalency agreement” between the federal and provincial governments that allowed an NEB review to fill the role of a provincial review did not have to be followed, the ruling said. Just a few weeks ago in late April, the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office ordered a provincial assessment of the project, which has yet to officially begin. Given the unprecedented regulatory overlap, and the fact that B.C. reviews involve comprehensive involvement of First Nations communities, there is no telling whether the federal government would have to wait for the provincial process to be complete before making a final decision.

British Columbians pipe up

Even if the federal government gives a green light to Trans Mountain, the province of British Columbia will still need to issue roughly 60 individual permits to Kinder Morgan before shovels can breach the ground. The Dogwood Initiative, an activist group that opposes the project, is already in the process of recruiting volunteers to gather the necessary signatures to hold a popular referendum. If the group is able to garner support from at least 10 per cent of voters in all B.C. ridings, the question would go to a province-wide vote that would almost certainly result in a majority of votes cast against the proposed pipeline expansion. Vancouver also passed a motion just last week calling on the federal government to hold a referendum on Trans Mountain. Since both the Dogwood Initiative proposal and the City of Vancouver motion only call for a referendum in the event that construction permits have been issued, the process would surely throw any potential approval into limbo.

There are a myriad of other potential roadblocks to actual pipeline building efforts getting underway. Anyone who remembers the saga of the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline will recall the process can sometimes be held up for decades. The Enbridge-backed Northern Gateway project is just the most recent example of a controversial pipeline mired in uncertainty despite having every possible regulatory approval in hand.

Trans Mountain faces the risk of a similar fate, unless significant political capital is spent to push through the morass.