Dismantle National Energy Board: panel suggests

A panel advising the government on how to overhaul the National Energy Board says the regulator should be dismantled and replaced with two new agencies, all within a more coherent national energy policy.

The five-member panel, appointed last fall, presented its report this morning to Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr.

After months of public hearings and talking to stakeholders, the panel says the National Energy Board has been given an impossible task: regulating the growth of the industry and marrying its growth with the government’s climate-change goals.

The panel recommends the government create a new national strategy which incorporates Ottawa’s policy vision on energy, the environment, and the economy.

And it says the government should take up to a year to itself consider whether any new project proposals align with that vision.

It recommends dismantling the board and replacing it with two agencies to separate the functions of regulation and review from the analysis and production of energy-related information.

The government is accepting comments online on the panel recommendations until June 14.

The review fulfills part of Carr’s ministerial mandate to “modernize the National Energy Board to ensure that its composition reflects regional views and has sufficient expertise in fields such as environmental science, community development and indigenous traditional knowledge.”