The Sierra Club called this mandate the final blow to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline.
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In a letter published Friday, Trudeau asked his Minister of Transportation to “formalize a moratorium on crude oil tanker traffic on British Columbia’s North Coast”, the Calgary Herald reports.
David Anderson, the BC MP who chaired the government’s environmental committee in 1972, and later became a Liberal government Environment Minister, says only the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has opposed the ban since its introduction.
Kitimat, British Columbia, was to be major oil export port if the Northern Gateway pipeline were built.
In his recent mandate letters to Minister of Transport Marc Garneau and Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard Hunter Tootoo, the Prime Minister states that he expects the Ministers to formalize the moratorium as a top priority.
The moratorium’s wording suggests it will only apply to crude oil tankers, not liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers.
In addition coming just one week after US President Obama’s rejection of Keystone XL – another proposed oil sands crude oil delivery pipeline – it left at least one project critic proclaiming, Northern Gateway will never happen.
A generation ago, during debate over shipment of oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the government of then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau enacted a ban on supertankers in Canada’s west coast water. “The next step is for Minister Garneau to enshrine the tanker ban in law so the coast and the people that depend on it will be protected in perpetuity”, Gouglas said. A ban would prevent hundreds of tankers each year from carrying diluted bitumen extracted from Alberta’s oil sands and piped up to northern B.C. from being shipped for export overseas.
In her speech, she said Alberta supports Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain expansion, which would almost triple to 890,000 bpd deliveries of oil from Edmonton to the B.C. Lower Mainland, as well as Energy East, a TransCanada project to ship 1.1 million bpd of Alberta crude into Eastern Canada.
However, Northern Gateway spokesman Ivan Giesbrecht said Friday that project proponents “remain committed to this essential Canadian infrastructure”. “While those previous bills did not pass, the necessary legal avenues clearly exist to swiftly legislate an oil tanker ban when Parliament reopens, bringing binding legal protection to this area”.
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These groups say Canada’s pipeline review process limits public participation, fails to meaningfully consult First Nations governments, and allows proponents to withhold important information.
