Energy East town hall meeting in North Bay, April 25. Photo by North Bay Now.
A recent Council of Canadians town hall meeting in North Bay on the Energy East pipeline was raised at the Liberal Party of Canada biennial policy convention now underway in Winnipeg.
On April 25, Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow presented new evidence at this town hall on the risks of TransCanada’s proposed 1.1 million barrel per day Energy East pipeline. She highlighted the findings of our report, When Oil Meets Water: How the Energy East pipeline threatens North Bay watersheds.
In an op-ed published in The Nugget just prior to the town hall, Barlow and Stop Energy East North Bay activist Donna Sinclair wrote, “The more people hear about Energy East, the more they are organizing against it. …They are challenging the backward thinking that would lead to an increase in climate pollution equivalent to adding seven million cars to our roads. They are spreading the word about TransCanada’s safety record. They are challenging the company’s vague assurances that Energy East is safe. They are coming together to protect their water and their children’s future. The Energy East pipeline is a big risk to North Bay and to every other community along its route. The drinking water of more than five million people is downstream from the pipeline.”
Yesterday, federal Environment minister Catherine McKenna and Natural Resources minister Jim Carr were on stage at the main hall in the RBC Convention Centre for a Liberal policy convention session on “how growing Canada’s economy and climate change action can go hand in hand.”
CBC reports, “A more-than-middle-aged man from North Bay, Ontario, stood and told the ministers that the big issue back home was the Energy East pipeline, which is to run under the town’s sole source of drinking water. He’d been to a meeting organized by anti-pipeline activists and heard all the ‘predictable’ arguments about what might happen. There was large group in the audience, he said, ‘who are reasonable people and who honestly hope that you can grow Canada’s economy and at the same time deal with climate change’. But how to reconcile these things, how to build pipelines and meet international climate targets, was a ‘puzzle’, both to him and to other ‘rational people’.”
Carr responded “we have to reconcile different interests all the time in government” and hear all perspectives.
If approved, the 4,500 kilometre pipeline would move 1.1 million barrels of oil per day. It would cross about 2,900 waterways and put at risk the source of drinking water for about 5 million people. The crude production needed to fill the Energy East pipeline would generate an additional 30 to 32 million tonnes of carbon pollution each year — the equivalent of adding more than seven million cars to our roads. It would spur 650,000 to 750,000 barrels per day of additional production from the tar sands. That would mean about a 40 per cent expansion of the tar sands. Nearly all of the 1.1 million barrels a day of crude oil the pipeline would carry would be exported unrefined. Those exports would increase the number of oil tankers in the Bay of Fundy from 115 to 281 a year. Right whales in the Bay of Fundy are already stressed from current levels of traffic and this would worsen that situation.
We maintain that the federal government’s stated commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the scientific need to keep 85 per cent of tar sands oil in the ground, and the obligation to respect the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples are irreconcilable with the Energy East pipeline.
Despite Carr’s purported commitment to hear all perspectives, he has also commented, “It’s important that we move as quickly as we can while being responsible — by ensuring that we’ve consulted with people who are part of the movement going forward to ensure that Canada is able to move its resources to market sustainably.” And he has said, “I think that’s one of the reasons we have not been able to get major approvals and major construction of pipelines to tidewater, because it hasn’t carried that public confidence that we seek to obtain. That’s our goal. That’s the process that we’re implementing now.”
The National Energy Board is scheduled to make its recommendation to the federal Cabinet on Energy East in March 2018.
The Cabinet will make its decision shortly after that.
