City rejects intervention in pipeline hearings

The city has snubbed a cooperation offer from four neighbouring municipalities and decided to do only the bare minimum in response to a proposed 63 km Imperial Oil pipeline from Hamilton to North York.

Image source: 2015. AboutPipelines.com.

The city has snubbed a cooperation offer from four neighbouring municipalities and decided to do only the bare minimum in response to a proposed 63 km Imperial Oil pipeline from Hamilton to North York. Council is also facing a new Enbridge fracked gas pipeline to be constructed entirely within Flamborough.

The Imperial Oil project replaces a portion of their existing pipeline that starts at the Nanticoke refinery of Imperial’s parent company Exxon Mobil and crosses the Grand River and the Haldimand Tract before passing through Waterdown. The portion being replaced starts in Waterdown and passes through Halton, Mississauga, Toronto and Peel.

Those four municipal governments have all applied for intervenor status in the expected hearings before the Ontario Energy Board, and they offered to share their legal representative with Hamilton. City staff presented this as an alternative to “give the city expanded rights” instead of just sending a letter to the regulatory agency. The cost would be a one-fifth share of $50,000.

“It’s not only giving the rights to comment as what we proposed in the [staff] report but it gives the right to participate as a party in the proceeding including asking questions of Imperial Oil, submitting evidence and making submissions to the Ontario Energy Board with respect to what alternately conditions should be imposed in the event that this application is approved,” explained city legal staff.

But Waterdown councillor Judi Partridge immediately opposed this option. She argued only 3.6 km of the pipe is inside Hamilton and “most of that goes through a rural area” so the city’s concerns “are not the same ones as Mississauga and Toronto [who] are dealing with pipelines going through people’s backyards in urban settings and crossing quite a few roads.”

Partridge said she has “not had anyone comment, even one email, from a resident of Flamborough asking about this particular project.” She also worried that the projected $10,000 cost of intervening might increase, although staff promised to get council’s permission to continue if that occurred.

“I’m definitely not interested in putting the city in that position of being an intervenor to help out other municipalities when we don’t share the same concerns,” Partridge concluded. She was the only councillor targeted by seven Imperial Oil lobbyists who registered with the city more than a year ago.

Other councillors were less supportive of the pipeline project and three of them – Danko, Nann and Wilson – voted against the majority.

Nann gave the climate emergency declaration as her reason noting “our effort to create a wholesome climate lens that we apply to all of city business.” Danko was surprised staff were not asking that the old pipeline be removed rather than left in the ground.

Guy Paparella explained that staff have given up asking for removals. “We’ve often requested that they decommission and remove and every single time we’ve asked that request has been denied.”

Halton is already using its intervenor status to push Imperial on a 25 page list of issues including a traffic management plan, the surveying and monitoring of existing wells, and protective actions for “all wetlands and sensitive vegetation communities and not just provincially significant wetlands.”

Halton notes that “the project footprint will cross 23.46 km of prime agricultural land” and consequently demands a “complete assessment of the impacts this project could/will have on the agricultural system”.  It argues for full compensation for farmers, noting that “it can take 4 to 7 years to obtain the level of productivity from the fields that was occurring in advance of the project due to the disruption of the soil ecosystem.”

Halton’s submission points out that “soil compaction, soil erosion, devastation of the soil ecosystem, ability to hold water (altered by the organic matter in the soil and particle size and soil type) all impact on yield which can have a significant effect and directly affect revenues for a farmer over multiple years.” It also criticizes the failure of Imperial to show significant woodlands or to mention the region’s natural heritage system in the company’s environmental report.