PLAIN TALK ON PIPELINES
Imagine you are Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, you’ve just been marooned on a desert planet all by yourself, and you discover your only reading material for the next four years is the Energy East Pipeline application to the NEB.
Suffice to say, Matt’s will to live would lose a lot of its believability.
We’re thinking he’d have stepped out for a terminal breath of fresh Martian air about the time he got to page xxxvii of the Table of Contents, and learned that when he finally reaches Appendix Vol 6-126, the payoff would be “Lévis Energy East Delivery Meter Station — Aerial Map.”
Of course, members of the National Energy Board can’t take that way out, even in Ottawa.
Neither can they use Martian rocks to spell out suggestions on what TransCanada should do with its 11-box, 68-binder, 30,000-page submission.
So the NEB has written a letter advising the company “when considering the numerous supplemental reports, project updates, errata and amendments” that have made the “sheer volume of information” even bigger, the whole “is difficult even for experts to navigate.”
Some Albertan readers — and especially those who have not examined the mind-numbing documents on the NEB website — may suspect that asking TransCanada to redo their work is really a punishing ploy for further delay.
As a newspaper knows better than most, a 30,000-page edit isn’t something you do on your coffee break, even when the story isn’t full of crucial technical data. By this time, even the folks who wrote it may have forgotten that the acronym NCOS stands for “new capacity open season.”
But let’s not jump to conclusions. It could be the outcome will be an approved project, and one that fewer Liberal voters will be able to disagree with, or suspect the fix was in.
The Energy East proposal sets out how many jobs the project will create and how much revenue it will add to provincial economies and government treasuries. We need skeptics to understand and accept that evidence, in the very same way an open trial gets facts out in the open and builds public confidence in the verdict.
As the Tory era in Alberta dragged on and on, it’s likely that even supporters of the Conservative dynasty didn’t take the regulatory process too seriously. After all, were the Tory appointees of an industry-friendly royalty-spending government really going to do more than tinker around the edges of proposals its friends in boardrooms made?
True, convincing everyone that Energy East will get a fair trial from Liberal Ottawa is probably more difficult than rescuing a man on Mars.
But accessible documents and clear efforts to fully understand what’s being asked are “mission critical” first steps.