CALGARY – Ellis Ross, chief councilor of the Haisla First Nation and a supporter of liquefied natural gas exports from Canada’s West Coast, said a federal panel’s recommendation that Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline should be built has hardened opposition to the project.
“If anything it confirms our stance” against the $6.5-billion oil pipeline, Mr. Ross said Friday in an interview.
“Our concern was the remediation in response to an oil spill, and I don’t think that really got covered off at all.”
After two years of public and regulatory hearings across British Columbia and Alberta, a three-member panel on Thursday said the economic benefits of the 1,178-kilometre pipeline outweigh the environmental risks posed by the project.
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The verdict will inform a decision expected within six months by the federal cabinet, which gets final say on the contentious pipeline.
Gateway would transport up to 525,000 barrels of oil sands-derived crude per day to a new supertanker port at Kitimat, B.C., beginning in 2018. A separate line would import 193,000 barrels a day of condensate, which is used by oil companies to thin bitumen so it can flow in pipelines.
But while energy executives lauded the panel’s recommendation as a first step toward opening new markets for Alberta’s landlocked crude, Thursday’s verdict has drawn sharp rebukes from aboriginal leaders.
Mr. Ross, whose band owns a slice of a small LNG terminal planned for the Douglas Channel, said the federal government “might get off to a bad start” by promising a decision on Gateway within six months. “You can’t just arbitrarily impose a time limit on consultations,” he said. The aboriginal group is prepared to fight the pipeline up to the Supreme Court of Canada, he said.
A big concern on the northwest coast is how diluted bitumen behaves if it were spilled in a marine environment, Mr. Ross said. One condition of Thursday’s approval compels Enbridge to plan for and fund a research program studying the behaviour and cleanup of heavy oils.
“There’s no real way to pick this product up out of a marine environment,” Mr. Ross said. “If they can prove that, then show us where this is being practiced around the world.” He later added: “I’m just not willing to actually put the Haisla in that position.”
In its long awaited decision, the panel steered clear of thorny issues of aboriginal rights and title, acknowledging only that the pipeline’s right-of-way includes territories of aboriginal groups who are signatories of Treaty No. 6 and Treaty No. 8.
In the event of a large oil spill, the panel found “there would be significant adverse effects on lands, waters, or resources used by aboriginal groups, and that the adverse effects would not be permanent and widespread.”
Mr. Ross rejected that view. “I’d like to see what permanent means and widespread when you go look at Kalamazoo, or Prince William Sound or the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, referring to a 2010 rupture on an Enbridge line in Michigan, the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Plc Macondo blowout, respectively. “The jury seems to be out in terms of what long-term means.”