Carney Fast Tracks Oil Pipeline, Promises Environmental Protection

Ending months of speculation, today the Carney government designated the West Coast oil pipeline a project of national interest, side-stepping environmental safeguards that have been in place for decades and charting a course that could irrevocably alter the Salish Sea.

The pipeline will send one million barrels of oil a day from Alberta’s oilsands to a new terminal at Roberts Bank, south of Vancouver. The Roberts Bank area sits in the Fraser River delta, a globally important ecosystem that supports one of the world’s largest salmon runs and the endangered southern resident killer whale population.

While details about the project remain sparse, the oil would be loaded onto very large crude carriers — super-sized tankers the length of three football fields that are unprecedented in the wildlife-rich Salish Sea.

Announcing the national interest designation in Fort McMurray, with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith at his side, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the project — now dubbed Pacific Link — will help reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States, which currently purchases about 90 per cent of Alberta’s oil.

“The oilsands are part of Canada’s once-in-a-generation opportunity to become a global energy superpower,” Carney said, adding that the pipeline project will create 140,000 jobs across the country and generate more than $20 billion in GDP annually.

He said Ottawa will invest $10 billion to expand the Roberts Bank terminal.

The project, which will largely be funded by taxpayers, is estimated to cost up to $43.7 billion.

The area around Roberts Bank is also a critical node on the Pacific Flyway for migrating birds, and home to the largest congregation of overwintering waterfowl and shorebirds in Canada.

Carney promised to strengthen protections for “the marine life that call these waters home,” including “a series of measures to protect the habitat of killer whales during construction.”

Yet the government’s environmental assessment of the already approved Roberts Bank Terminal 2 port expansion project — a separate project scheduled to begin construction in 2028 — concluded that the second container port would cause severe and permanent adverse effects on the struggling killer whale population, Fraser River chinook salmon and migratory birds such as western sandpipers that rely on intertidal biofilm to fuel their migratory journey to breeding grounds in Alaska and Siberia.

Widespread concern from experts and stakeholders

Scientists, conservationists, legal experts, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and the state of Washington are raising significant concerns about the impacts of the new pipeline, terminal and boost in tanker traffic in the increasingly busy Salish Sea.

Georgia Lloyd-Smith, a staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, called the decision “financially and legally risky,” while Katisha Paul, the women’s representative for the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, told The Tyee that it is “inappropriate” for Carney to talk about addressing environmental impacts when they aren’t fully known, in the absence of a thorough environmental assessment.

The national interest designation means that the new oil pipeline, which will largely follow the sometimes troublesome route of the Trans Mountain pipeline, is already pre-approved before many details are known and before any formal assessment of environmental impacts or substantive consultations with impacted First Nations take place.

Carney said Canada’s Major Projects Office will work to finalize conditions for the project — including ownership, benefits and environmental protections — by next September, “clearing the way to get shovels in the ground.”

The national interest designation gives the federal cabinet the power to exempt the pipeline project from a host of federal laws and regulations designed to protect wildlife and waters, including the Fisheries Act and the Species at Risk Act.

Last month, the Carney government exempted inter-provincial pipelines, including the West Coast oil pipeline, from the Impact Assessment Act.

Reviews carried out under the act identify project risks, examine alternatives, ensure benefits outweigh costs, and detail how projects could affect communities, wildlife, the climate, water and Indigenous Rights.

Instead, the pipeline project will be more narrowly reviewed by the Canadian Energy Regulator, making it more difficult for the public to participate.

“There are likely to be fewer opportunities for public voices to be heard,” Lloyd-Smith, who heads the marine program for West Coast Environmental Law, told The Tyee.

Carney said Canada has become “weighed down” by “well-intentioned, but arduous, often duplicative, regulatory processes.”

“To build at scale and speed again, we must do things differently,” he said, adding that Canada will remain “a country of high standards.”

Today’s announcement comes after the state of Washington asked Carney not to designate the pipeline a project of national interest, saying shared waters are “too valuable” to expedite a project that could lead to a catastrophic oil spill and harm ecosystems and the maritime economy.

In a letter to the Carney government, Casey Sixkiller, director of the state’s Department of Ecology, the lead agency for oil spill prevention and response, wrote that an oil spill from a Very Large Crude Carrier could be up to eight times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and impose “catastrophic environmental and economic consequences for our state.”

Lloyd-Smith said geological assessments of the soil around Roberts Bank suggest the area would be prone to liquefaction in the event of an earthquake. It’s “alarming,” she said, “if you think about crude oil being stored there, and the potential for a land-based spill into the Fraser River estuary — [it’s] scary.”

Carney’s environmental promises

On Tuesday, at a stop in Vancouver, Carney announced new measures to protect the ocean in the event of an oil spill, as part of a $1.2 billion commitment “to better protect Canada’s oceans and the life they sustain.”

The commitments include spending $740 million over the next four years on ocean conservation measures such as strengthening “incident prevention and preparedness,” developing a forecasting system to improve real-time emergency response and establishing a new framework on all coasts to recover from oil spills and other marine pollution incidents.

Carney also pledged $136 million over the next four years for initiatives such as a national marine mammal oil spill response plan to “act quickly to protect marine mammals and their habitats in the event of a spill,” and to enhance capacity to monitor and mitigate underwater noise.

Noise pollution makes it more difficult for whales to communicate with each other and to use echolocation to find prey.

Lloyd-Smith said the West Coast oil pipeline project will “likely drive the precious southern resident killer whale population towards extinction.” She also noted it will increase greenhouse gas emissions.

No free, prior and informed consent from First Nations

Paul, who is from the W̱JOȽEȽP and Lil’wat nations, said the pipeline project does not have the free, prior and informed consent of all impacted First Nations — one of the pillars of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that Canada adopted and legislated — and legal action will likely ensue.

“There’s frustration, anger, pain, [and] most of all sadness that we have to have another generation of young Indigenous leaders who have to fight against major projects and resource extraction off our lands,” she said.

In August, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs wrote an open letter to Carney and Smith, saying the pipeline proposal threatens the inherent rights of First Nations and accelerates the expansion of the fossil fuel industry at a time when communities are already experiencing devastating climate disasters.

The pipeline and additional tanker traffic would expose First Nations lands, waters, marine ecosystems, cultures, economies and ways of life to “unacceptable risks from oil spills, environmental degradation and accelerating climate change,” union president Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, union vice-president Linda Innes and secretary-treasurer Marilyn Slett wrote to Carney and Smith.

They wrote that Canada and Alberta must respect the decisions of First Nations that withhold consent and ensure that any assessment fully addresses oil-spill and marine shipping risks and impacts to lands, waters, salmon and other species, as well as the pipeline’s climate consequences.

In late September, at the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs annual general assembly meeting, delegates passed a women’s declaration sounding the alarm about the “swift advancement” of federal and provincial major projects without free, prior and informed consent.

The declaration also pointed to “the erosion of environmental protections and First Nations women’s rights and safety” and the heightened risk of gender-based violence and the Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit Peoples crisis in relation to resource extraction.

Paul said the West Coast oil pipeline project will bring “man camps” and a rise in fear and instability because of worries about the safety of women, girls and two-spirit people. “When the land is exploited, our women become exploited. So environmental justice is also women’s justice,” she said.

The pipeline project will also pose significant problems for killer whales, salmon populations and kelp forests, she said, adding that, “the entire ecosystem is going to be in danger because of the increased tanker traffic.”

She called Carney’s announcement about new funding for oil spills “a warning sign all on its own.”