Pipeline project now a mountain for taxpayers

Our billions will put species at risk, Chris Genovali says.

The Canadian government’s move to buy the Trans Mountain Pipeline project from Texasbased Kinder Morgan is economically and environmentally dubious. With the decision to pour billions of tax dollars into purchasing the pipeline and building the expansion, Trans Mountain should now be renamed Taxpayer Mountain.

There is a high probability this will end up as a case of buyer’s remorse on a grand scale.

As a June 1 Vancouver Sun editorial pointed out, Kinder Morgan Canada’s assets were valued at $3.7 billion in 2017 for which Ottawa has agreed to pay a premium to predominantly U.S. investors for an aging 65-year-old pipeline. Notably, the $4.5-billion acquisition cost doesn’t include the additional staggering amount of money still required to build the expansion, which by various estimates will bring the total cost of the taxpayer-funded bailout to somewhere between $10 billion and $15 billion, or more. Nor does the purchase price reflect the annual operations and maintenance costs, which The Sun editorial noted as being more than $200 million last year.

Pro-pipeline guesstimates of the jobs that would be created by the expansion appear to be hyper-inflated at best. The Parkland Institute’s Ricardo Acuna states, “The claim of 15,000 jobs during the construction phase of the pipeline appears to be a phantom number with no real evidence or credibility behind it,” and that the post-construction 37,000-jobs projection comes from a questionable Conference Board of Canada report, “plus another 3,000 jobs that Kinder Morgan seems to have invented for good measure.” As energy analyst David Hughes notes, “Permanent jobs upon completion of construction would tally 40 in Alberta and 50 in B.C., according to Kinder Morgan’s application to the National Energy Board.”

The federal government’s invoking of the national interest is transparently self-serving, as it tries to evade responsibility for creating this debacle in the first place. By having accepted a flawed NEB recommendation to approve Trans Mountain, Ottawa triggered the predicament it continues to try to pin on the B.C. government.

Regardless of who owns Trans Mountain, the question remains as to whether the approval of the expansion was even lawful. It is the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s contention in ongoing litigation that it wasn’t, and that both the NEB and federal cabinet violated the Species at Risk Act. Ultimately, the NEB made an 11th-hour decision to arbitrarily truncate the Trans Mountain project at tidewater, excluding impacts on the marine environment, including endangered southern resident killer whales, from the environmental assessment.

Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Dominic LeBlanc and Minister of Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna recently announced that southern resident killer whales face “imminent threats” to their survival and recovery. One of the primary factors causing the southern residents to be imminently threatened is the noise and disturbance produced by vessel traffic in the Salish Sea.

Trans Mountain’s tanker route transects critical habitat necessary for the survival and recovery of the southern residents. Killer whales produce and listen to sounds to establish and maintain critical life functions: to navigate and communicate, find and select mates, and locate and capture prey (especially Chinook salmon). The existing level of noise in the Salish Sea has already degraded critical habitat and reduced the feeding efficiency of these whales. The Trans Mountain expansion will further increase noise levels, creating further reductions in their feeding.

In January, Ecojustice — on behalf of Raincoast, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Wildlife Fund Canada — petitioned the ministers for emergency protection for the whales under the Species at Risk Act. The aforementioned imminent threat announcement by the federal government is a response to that petition. The announcement, in our opinion, also means that the ministers are now legally obligated to recommend that the cabinet issue emergency protections for southern resident killer whales.

So how is the government going to reconcile the conflict of interest it now finds itself in as owner and operator of a project that substantially amplifies the likelihood of extinction for a unique and endangered group of orcas as a result of the noise generated by said project’s increase in tanker traffic?