Watson won’t quibble over climate — just the NEB’s role in the debate
He came. He saw. He got an earful.
Peter Watson’s 34- stop “national engagement” tour that took him to nearly the four corners of the Canadian landscape over six months in his first year as chairman of the National Energy Board concluded this week at the NEB’s 2015 pipeline safety forum in Calgary.
Meetings with stakeholder groups in some cities — including Halifax, Winnipeg and Vancouver — led to noisy protests by pipeline opponents as the national debate over oilsands development, greenhouse gas emissions and the environment focused on the NEB’s role in public policy.
“There were a number of places where there was a lot of concern, a lot of debate around the politics of energy and the dynamics of energy," Watson acknowledged in an interview at the NEB’s offices in Calgary’s Beltline area across the railway tracks from the towers that are home to Canada’s oil and gas industry. There have been repeated demands — including from two high- profile interveners who quit the review for Kinder Morgan Canada’s Trans Mountain Expansion — for the federal regulator to consider climate change when determining if a crude oil pipeline is in the public good. One B. C. group is seeking to take the fight over the NEB’s mandate to the Supreme Court of Canada. Watson is having no part of it. “I don’t quibble whether there should be a discussion,” he said. "It’s just not for us as a regulator, given our mandate. We’re not the right place for those issues to get sorted out.
“This a very complex system and series of discussions governments are engaged in internationally as well as nationally. My point of view is simply that isn’t an issue that’s going to get solved inside a regulatory application for a project … we can’t wander around and create new roles for ourselves.”
Given the latest amendments to the NEB’s mandate — including the controversial two- year limit on reviews — were part of the federal government’s 2012 Jobs, Growth and Long- term Prosperity Act, it’s hardly a surprise that critics question Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s expectations for the NEB.
Ottawa has been clear the outcome it seeks from funding energy regulation is “strong economic growth.”
However, as Watson noted, the NEB also has a mandate to be unbiased and neutral.
The Harper government has been a vocal advocate for new pipelines to Canada’s east and west coasts to move growing volumes of oilsands crude to global markets. Environmentalists contend there is no way Canada will meet its international climate commitments — already a long shot — if the pipelines proposed reach tidewater.
Watson — who said the NEB faces more challenges than ever providing life cycle oversight of 73,000 kilometres of interprovincial and international pipelines in Canada — isn’t interested in mission creep.
“People are lobbying governments all the time for changes they want to see to policy,” said Watson, who was the top bureaucrat in the Alberta government before the federal Conservatives selected him to head the NEB last June. “Regulators should stick to their mandates. They shouldn’t be advocacy bodies.”
The trips that covered close to 40,000 kilometres to meet First Nations, municipal leaders, business groups, environmental organizations and students had Watson visit big cities as well as smaller locations like Hampton, N. B.; Hagersville, Ont.; Qu’Appelle, Sask. and Iqaluit, Nunavut.
Pipeline ruptures are low- probability but high- impact events for communities and Watson heard in cities and towns about the need to protect water and land in addition to concern about the ability of industry, regulators and first responders to deal with an oil spill.
Watson used the NEB’s safety forum here to tell the industry higher public expectations for operational performance and community engagement will mean they must do better and share more of the details about emergency response plans.
The unequivocal message is industry must be “absolutely obsessed” with a culture of safety, he said.
One concern raised recently about the NEB didn’t come from environmental activists but the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association. The group told a Senate committee on pipeline safety last month the NEB can’t afford to retain experienced engineers because salaries are higher in industry.
Watson — who is not about to play politics over the government’s policies or funding priorities — noted there was an additional $ 80 million over five years for the NEB in the budget in April that will offset some of the funding that expires in 2016- 17.
“We’ve got a tremendous amount of stability with that funding," he said.
That funding stability should allow Watson to deliver on his mandate, precisely as he sees it.