City staff are promising to intervene in the dispute between Enbridge and the National Energy Board over how to protect Hamilton waterways vulnerable to the controversial 39-year-old Line 9 pipeline that the company wants to expand and use to transport unrefined bitumen. Whether municipal and provincial governments can regulate the explosion of pipeline expansions is already being argued in British Columbia courts and this constitutional issue is likely to spread across eastern Canadian jurisdictions in the path of the latest mega-pipe proposal – the 4600 km “Energy East” facility from Alberta to New Brunswick to export bitumen via the St Lawrence River or through the Bay of Fundy.
Despite federal claims of exclusive constitutional rights to approve all such projects, the City of Burnaby has launched a Supreme Court challenge to block a Kinder Morgan pipe from going through a municipal conservation area, while more than a dozen legal actions have been launched by First Nations against the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal. The NDP in Ontario is also demanding a provincial environmental assessment on Line 9.
“Ever since the federal government gutted environmental protection two years ago, we’ve seen a culture of impunity grow within Canada’s oil and gas sector,” argued Peter Tabuns in the Ontario legislature last week before asking “will the provincial government fill this vacuum and conduct a full environmental assessment of the Line 9 project?”
Hamilton’s latest foray into pipeline regulation is more modest and comes in response to intervention by a local climate change group. The Hamilton 350 Committee wrote to senior city staff last week seeking urgent action to get Spencer Creek and other local waterways designated by the NEB as “major water courses” requiring emergency shut-off valves to minimize potential spills.
The group got quick assurances from city manager Chris Murray and city solicitor Janice Atwood-Petkovski that “staff will now be submitting a further letter to the NEB reiterating the City’s concerns around protection of provincially-significant wetlands and environmentally-significant areas, as well as placement or installation of valves to ensure that watercourses in the City of Hamilton are adequately protected.”
In a June submission to the NEB Enbridge appeared to exclude all Hamilton or Halton waterways from designation as “major” and offered addition of only 17 new remote-controlled valves to the existing 38 on the 830 kilometre Line 9. In a response earlier this month, the NEB demanded much more. But in an October 23rd reply the company offers no changes and instead argues that the NEB misunderstood the June submission which Enbridge claims has actually defined nearly all of the 329 water crossings as major.
The company explains it looked at putting valves “approximately one kilometre upstream and one kilometre downstream of 76 watercourse crossings” – an addition of 109 valves – and decided this would result “in a total average reduction in maximum release volume across the system of only 7.6% beyond the reduction achieved by the current project valve design” and therefore not reasonable.
The June submission said a spill of 5530 barrels (879,000 litres) into Spencer Creek was “as low as reasonably practicable”. The latest Enbridge letter to the NEB doesn’t provide any specific numbers for individual streams, only averages across all watercourses.
While continuing to oppose any expansion of Line 9, the Hamilton 350 Committee is praising the city for its attempts to reduce the volume of possible pipeline spills. The residents’ group argues all expanded infrastructure for fossil fuels is an obvious recipe to worsen climate change.
“Line 9 and Energy East can only worsen climate change and greatly increase the risk of disastrous spills,” says the committee’s media release. “The oil and pipeline corporations get the benefits, while communities in the path of these schemes as well as around the world are forced to bear all the risks.”