Conservatives Vow to End Oil Tanker Moratorium

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in early spring and nearly 50 people have filed into a windowless room at the Smithers legion to hear from Conservative federal election candidate Ellis Ross.

The Skeena-Bulkley Valley riding in northwest B.C., at 10 times the area of Vancouver Island, is geographically among the largest ridings in Canada. It is also one of the least populated, with just 90,000 residents.

The region, with its deep seaports that offer access to overseas markets, has recently become a focus as the United States wages its trade war and Canada seeks to diversify its energy markets.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that his party, if it forms government, would overturn a long-standing moratorium on oil tankers in the waters off B.C.’s north coast, which was formalized in 2019 as Bill C-48.

Repealing the legislation would make way for an oil pipeline to the north coast, something residents, municipalities and First Nations strongly opposed during the fight against Northern Gateway, Enbridge’s proposed diluted bitumen pipeline that would have carried heavy crude from Alberta to a port in Kitimat.

The project was eventually cancelled by the federal Liberal government in 2016. Poilievre has repeatedly pointed to it as a failure of the current government.

Many residents fear that transporting crude oil through the region could, in the case of a spill, have a devastating impact on existing industries such as tourism and fishing. Any mention of Northern Gateway or the tanker ban was notably missing from a press conference Poilievre gave in Terrace on Monday.

As Haisla Nation chief councillor, Ross took a hard stance against Northern Gateway. But in Senate committee hearings on Bill C-48, he took a softer position, describing the legislation as political red tape that could stifle industry.

Outside the Smithers legion, he wouldn’t rule out overturning the tanker ban, saying it’s “not a simple answer.”

“There’s a lot of Aboriginal title that has to be addressed,” Ross said, before pivoting to recent comments by Liberal party leader Mark Carney that his government would use emergency powers to build energy infrastructure.

“I don’t agree with Carney saying that he’d invoke emergency powers to build pipelines,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is reverse Ottawa’s policies. If you do invoke emergency powers, what does that say about you railroading over Aboriginal rights and title?”

Among the policies targeted by Conservatives are Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, dubbed the “no more pipelines act” by the Alberta government, and plans for a federal emissions cap on the oil and gas industry.

And, of course, a repeal of the west coast tanker ban, legislation Poilievre formally committed to overturning on April 1.

NDP incumbent: ‘We don’t have capacity to clean up spills’

The Skeena-Bulkley Valley riding extends south from B.C.’s border with the Yukon, sweeping around the Alaska Panhandle to the province’s north coast and Haida Gwaii. It includes communities such as Terrace, Prince Rupert, Kitimat and Houston — resource towns that rely on industries like forestry and fishing.

The riding has long been held by the New Democrats. The NDP’s Nathan Cullen won the seat in 2004 and represented the riding until 2019, when former Smithers mayor Taylor Bachrach, also NDP, replaced him as MP.

Cullen went on to win a seat in the B.C. legislature in 2020. He represented the region as MLA until losing to Conservative candidate Sharon Hartwell in the election this past fall.

The upset was seen as a reflection of the widening political divide and increasing dissatisfaction with the provincial NDP, as B.C.’s resurgent Conservative party absorbed the centre-right BC United and narrowly missed forming government.

Six months later, Ross appears poised to flip the federal Skeena-Bulkley Valley riding from orange to blue, with electoral projection website 338Canada predicting a "safe" Conservative win.

(While the Liberals acclaimed a candidate on March 30, the party has little chance of winning a riding where it has rarely exceeded 20 per cent of the vote.)

NDP incumbent Bachrach, who supports the tanker ban, doesn’t believe local sentiment has changed around transporting crude oil through the region.

“The reality is we still don’t have the capacity to clean up petroleum spills in our waters, whether that’s in the river or on our coast. The more transportation of those products occurs, the higher the risk,” he said.

Bill C-48 prohibits tankers carrying more than 12,500 tonnes of crude oil from stopping at B.C. ports between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle.

The legislation formalized a previous moratorium on oil shipments through the region that dated back to the 1970s, which was meant to force U.S. oil tankers to avoid the Canadian coastline.

At a time when voters are focused on things such as the toxic drug crisis, housing affordability and cost of living, Bachrach said the tanker ban hasn’t been a hot topic on the doorsteps he’s visited. While he said there’s interest in diversifying trade markets, he described a kind of “economic nationalism,” with voters pushing for made-in-Canada economic solutions.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people who are frustrated with the number of raw logs that we’re exporting, who are baffled by the fact that Canada doesn’t, for the most part, refine its own oil, and who want to see local food in local stores,” he said.

While the tanker ban might not be top of mind, Bachrach doesn’t equate that with a lack of support for the legislation.

“That moratorium represents what was a strong view in our region that oil tankers didn’t fit with people’s vision for the future and that the risks to our coast and our watersheds were too great,” he said. “There was a strong consensus from nations up and down our coast and up and down our rivers saying no to crude oil.”

It’s not the first time the Conservatives have raised the issue on the campaign trail.

During the 2021 federal election, and following a failed attempt by Conservatives to overturn the tanker ban, former party leader Erin O’Toole touted Northern Gateway during a campaign stop in Ontario. At that time, coastal nations like the Heiltsuk and the Haida said they remained opposed to the project.

More recently, in January, the Haisla Nation council reaffirmed its opposition to a bitumen pipeline through the nation’s traditional territory.

At the Smithers campaign stop in late March, Ross, who in addition to spending years on Haisla council served two terms as a B.C. MLA, focused on his role championing the region’s liquefied natural gas industry.

“It was the Haisla people and First Nations from Kitimat that actually pushed LNG exports on the provincial government and federal government,” he said. “We had to convince them this was the way to go.”

The LNG Canada export facility located in Haisla territory, which has support from the nation, is set to begin exporting this year, making it the first LNG processing facility in the country. The nation is also a majority owner in Cedar LNG, an approved facility that it plans to build in partnership with Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corp.

Both facilities will connect to the 670-kilometre Coastal GasLink pipeline, which will ship gas from northeast B.C. to the coast for overseas export. The pipeline faced fierce opposition from Wet’suwet’en Nation hereditary leaders, who have long opposed pipeline development through their traditional territory, leading to several high-profile police actions and dozens of arrests over the course of its construction.

While Coastal GasLink divided First Nations in the region, Enbridge’s 1,170-kilometre Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have brought 220 oil tankers to the north coast every year, faced a wall of opposition.

The federal government approved the pipeline in 2014. The Federal Court of Appeal overturned the approval in 2016, saying the government had failed to adequately consult First Nations. The project was officially cancelled later that year.

While Enbridge has shown a lack of interest in resurrecting the project, CEO Greg Ebel recently suggested that regulatory amendments could change that.

The Texas-based oil executive was among 14 CEOs who signed an open letter last month calling on Canadian political leaders to declare an energy crisis that would allow government to “use all its available emergency powers to ensure that the dramatic regulatory restructuring required to expand the oil and natural gas sector is rapidly achieved.”

Among the oil executives’ requests was that regulation like the Impact Assessment Act and tanker ban be “overhauled and simplified.”

Poilievre responded last week, saying his government would meet all of the oil executives’ demands, including repealing the tanker ban legislation.

In an email to The Tyee, Enbridge spokesperson Jesse Semko didn’t comment on Poilievre’s recent commitment to the oil and gas sector but reiterated that the company has “no plans to develop Northern Gateway.”

“Our current effort is focused on leveraging our pipeline in the ground and our existing rights-of-way. There’s lots of capacity there that is efficient and less disruptive to communities and the environment,” Semko said.

Ross: ‘Unravel Liberal policies’ preventing pipelines

Inside the Smithers legion, the tanker ban wasn’t top of mind for those who gathered to hear from their Conservative candidate.

Instead, Ross fielded questions about whether the Conservatives would consider reinstating the death penalty for first-degree murder, or deregulate gun ownership as a solution to protecting Canadian sovereignty. (Ross demurred, pointing to Conservative policies on life imprisonment and saying that Poilievre had promised to repeal firearms prohibitions implemented by the Liberals.)

Ross raised the issue of pipelines only once, reiterating his opposition to Mark Carney’s comments that a Liberal government would use emergency powers to push through energy projects.

When Carney was asked to clarify his comments, a Liberal party spokesperson told The Tyee that while the Liberal leader believes there is a need to accelerate the building of major projects, “there is no project that is going to be built without Indigenous consultation and consent, and same thing with environmental assessment.”

The spokesperson added that a Liberal government would not amend the Impact Assessment Act and said the party has “not made any commitment to touch the tanker ban.”

Raising the spectre of the Emergencies Act is likely to hit a nerve in a room where at least some Conservative supporters backed the 2022 “Freedom Convoy.”

A month-long protest that gridlocked downtown Ottawa in response to vaccine mandates and other pandemic measures, the protest ended after the federal government exercised emergency powers, a move the Federal Court later determined had violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As Ross spoke to the crowd, he often referenced government power and overreach, saying Canada “was supposed to be a land of freedom.” He pointed to freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

(Ross didn’t specifically mention freedom of the press, and it was unclear if he knew that an organizer with the campaign stop told The Tyee that it was “a closed event to the media.” Speaking at the event, Ross defended the role of traditional media, saying that social media and AI will make it “really tough for us to find the truth.”)

Ross also tied freedoms to the experience of First Nations living under the Indian Act.

“I try to warn people, when you give away a bit of your rights to government, be careful, because once they take a little bit, they’ll start taking more,” he said, speaking outside the venue prior to the event.

Ross criticized governments that “don’t really pay attention to the First Nations that want economic development to resolve poverty or unemployment.”

He pointed out that Lax Kw’alaams and Nisga’a governments opposed the tanker ban.

He also acknowledged that many First Nations supported the tanker ban. But he confirmed that the potential for future oil transportation through the region is not off the table.

“First Nation leaders, the ones I’ve met over the last 15 years, they’re all trying to do one thing. They’re trying to lift their people out of poverty,” he said. “Hopefully we resolve that as a first step for pipeline communities along the route.”