An article published last week in the National Post that claims a “secret” deal was struck between oil companies and environmentalists has ruffled many feathers — from corporate big wigs in Calgary to environmental activists on the West Coast.

According to Claudia Cattaneo’s story, Alberta’s climate change plan — which introduced a carbon tax, phased out coal-fired electricity and put a cap on oilsands emissions — was “the product of secret negotiations between four top oilsands companies and four environmental organizations.”

I’m not sure how secret any of that was given that all of those players could clearly be seen on stage with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley when she announced the plan, but the story goes on to state: “The companies agreed to the cap in exchange for the environmental groups backing down on opposition to oil export pipelines, but the deal left other players on the sidelines, and that has created a deep division in Canada’s oil and gas sector.”

The remainder of the story goes into how various oil companies have their knickers in a twist over the deal.  You’d think environmentalists would be dancing in the streets about that, but no — it’s actually hard to say who’s more outraged: environmentalists, who bristle at the idea of a secret deal and who don’t think the agreement is strong enough, or oil companies, who don’t think the new regulations will help them gain the market access they’re so desperately seeking.

Let’s just all hold our horses for a second.

First off, let’s look at the source. Cattaneo has spewed quite a bit of industry drivel over the years and her interpretation of Canada’s energy politics leaves much to be desired. Has she exhibited much understanding of how social movements actually work? Nope.

Secondly, was there a deal to stop opposition to oil export pipelines? There were at least five environmental groups on stage for the announcement: Forest Ethics, the Pembina Institute, Clean Energy Canada, Equiterre and Environmental Defence.

Forest Ethics has publicly stated that its campaign against Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline won’t change.

Environmental Defence’s executive director Tim Gray told DeSmog Canada that its work on pipeline issues from a climate, water, biodiversity and community impact perspective will continue. The organization is now looking to the feds for a revised review process for pipelines, which includes a climate test that takes into account all infrastructure, including trains, and respects Alberta’s cap on oilsands emissions.

The Pembina Institute’s executive director Ed Whittingham told DeSmog Canada that Pembina’s oilsands advocacy work will continue. Pembina’s advocacy around pipelines has always been out of concern for upstream impacts — not surprising for a group founded in Alberta, on the heels of a deadly sour gas well blowout.  While many of Pembina’s climate-related concerns have been addressed by Alberta’s climate plan, “lots of air, land and water concerns remain,” Whittingham said.

Clean Energy Canada never campaigned against pipelines in the first place. And Equiterre couldn’t be reached, but I’d hazard a guess they’re in the same boat as the others.

So, sounds to me as though there was no deal of the sort that Cattaneo described.

Thirdly, even if there was a deal, a deal with four environmental groups wouldn’t be worth the hypothetical notepad it was jotted on given the breadth of opposition to new oil pipelines in this country — from municipalities like Vancouver and Burnaby to First Nations to grassroots activists to the umpteen environmental groups that weren’t on that stage.

“People who think climate policy in Alberta will ‘buy market access’ through B.C. don’t understand concerns around Indigenous rights, tanker traffic, oil spills or the grossly unequal distribution of economic risk and benefit,” said Kai Nagata, energy and democracy director at B.C.-based Dogwood Initiative.

It’s not helping the industry’s case that a landmark study released on Tuesday by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences confirms that diluted bitumen, such as that carried by Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, sinks in water if not cleaned up immediately, making for a nightmare scenario.

The study, Spills of Diluted Bitumen from Pipelines: A Comparative Study of Environmental Fate, Effects, and Response, concluded that diluted bitumen poses unique risks compared to other blends of crude oil.

Which brings me back to my point: the pipeline deal-breaker in B.C. has always been the risk of oil spills. Alberta’s action on climate change doesn’t move the needle on that.

Now, to the climate plan itself. Many environmentalists aren’t terribly impressed with it. Take this revealing infographic by Barry Saxifrage, which shows how Alberta’s emissions will continue to grow until 2030. (Canada has promised to reduce emissions 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.)

However, we must take into consideration that Alberta has already issued permits for another six million barrels a day of oilsands production. The new cap means that, at current emissions levels, three million barrels of those barrels will stay in the ground. That’s a seriously bold move in a province that has an economy 70 per cent based on oil — and that has already seen 40,000 layoffs in the energy industry this year.

All of the enviro grousing of late has reminded me of Rebecca Solnit’s stellar piece in The Guardian a few years back, written to her dismal allies on the U.S. left.

“If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears,” Solnit wrote. “Can you imagine how far the civil rights movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger!”

Environmentalists are fighting the richest industry in the world — an industry that has spent millions of dollars to confuse the public about climate change science. They are finally starting to see some victories. The climate change plan enacted in Alberta was unimaginable a year ago. It has the “100 per cent” support of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam.

If we want any policy to stick — not to be struck down like former Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s royalty review — it needs to have broad support. Part of the job of the environmental movement should be to help build that support.

To quote Solnit again: “Being different (from the radical right) means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.”

The fact industry and environmental leaders met informally over the past year, found some common ground and ended up standing on stage together to announce a major step forward on Alberta climate policy is a great thing. (And saying that does not mean I don’t acknowledge that while great, it’s not sufficient for Alberta to do its fair share to keep the planet from warming more than two degrees.)

As Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor in the faculty of environmental studies at York University, wrote recently: “To say a policy is great does not mean there is not more work to be done.”

Without further ado, may the pipeline battles continue.

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The National Energy Board (NEB), Canada’s federal pipeline regulator, has come under tremendous public criticism over the last three years for limiting public participation in its review of major oil pipeline proposals. In recent years the board has denied hundreds of Canadians an opportunity to voice their concerns on projects like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline and Enbridge’s Line 9.

TransCanada’s Energy East, Canada’s largest proposed oil pipeline, is the newest project to land on the NEB’s desk. Despite major barriers to participation in the public hearing process, Canadians are preparing to apply in droves, even if just for the opportunity to be officially rejected from the process.

“We can’t sit back and we can’t afford the luxury of despair," Donna Sinclair of North Bay, Ontario said. "We need to resist efforts to shut us out of the process.”

Sinclair, who was denied the opportunity to submit a letter of comment regarding the Line 9 pipeline project in 2013, plans on applying to participate in the NEB review process for Energy East.

Why Participate in a Broken Process?

Despair about the process, especially for pipeline critics like Sinclair, is understandable enough. After recent changes to federal legislation the NEB now limits participation only to members of the public the board believes are “directly affected” or possess “relevant information or expertise” on a given project.

“The narrow restrictions on speech are completely anti-democratic,” Sinclair told DeSmog.

Canadians wishing to submit comments to the NEB on the 1.1 million barrels-a-day Energy East pipeline must complete the board’s ‘application to participate’ form by March. Completion of the form does not guarantee one’s participation in the NEB-run public hearing process.

What qualifies an individual as having the relevant level of expertise can at times be difficulty to ascertain. Last spring the NEB refused the application of 27 scientists and experts from B.C. universities who registered to participate in the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline hearings.

Over two thousand people and organizations applied to participate in the NEB Trans Mountain hearings. Four hundred and sixty-eight were rejected outright.

The approval of the contentious Northern Gateway pipeline, despite broad public opposition, worked to convince many British Columbians that the board’s only real authority resides in its ability to dictate approval conditions. The NEB subjected the Northern Gateway pipeline’s approval to a hefty total of 209 conditions. 

Further weakening the NEB’s authority, thanks to omnibus budget bill C-38, decisions by the board are now subject to federal cabinet approval, leaving what was previously a quasi-judicious and independent decision ultimately in the hands of politicians.

Even individuals from the energy industry are losing faith in the process. Last November, Mark Eliesen, a former energy executive with 40 years experience, publicly quit the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain public hearings, calling the NEB process "fraudulent" and a "public deception." Even B.C.'s environment minister Mark Polak said the province has had its "own issues with the process," which include the NEB defending Kinder Morgan's right to withhold critical information on things like spill response measures.

In this light, it is perhaps astonishing Canadians continue to apply en masse to be heard by the NEB on new proposed pipelines like Energy East.

So why does the public still try to elbow its way into a broken process which decides, ostensibly without their regard, the fate of new pipelines in Canada?

Hearings Drive Public Awareness, Opposition

“Participating in the NEB process helps to bring forward new information and keep the issue alive so that awareness and opposition grows,” Tzeporah Berman, legendary B.C. environmentalist and co-founder of ForestEthics, told DeSmog Canada.

“In the end the NEB may approve a project, but if you have approval without social license and are facing lawsuits, difficulty with provincial permits and massive protests, the barriers to development are pretty serious,” she said.

The Northern Gateway pipeline is a prime example.

Over one thousand five hundred Canadians presented oral statements against the pipeline to the NEB. Attempts to criticize pipeline opponents – most infamously in former Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver’s ‘foreign funded radicals’ letter – drove further support for the opposition movement.

Defend Our Coast Protest Against the Northern Gateway Pipeline in 2012.

The NEB ultimately approved the project, yet the hearing process generated a massive anti-pipeline coalition comprised of engineers, scientists, First Nations, municipalities, environmental organizations and a good portion of the general public.

Strong social pressure undoubtedly influenced the unprecedented 209 conditions the NEB eventually attached to the pipeline’s approval. Meeting every condition may actually be impossible for the project’s proponent, Enbridge.

The NEB’s conditions for Enbridge’s Line 9 project in Ontario and Quebec have similarly delayed the pipeline’s progress.

Public concern and criticism may not sway the NEB’s recommendation or the federal government’s decision on a project, but it is certainly leaving its mark in other ways.

The Public Forces Unique Pipeline Issues To the Surface

“Public participation in recent pipeline processes have brought forth some unique issues,” Tanya Nayler, staff lawyer with the Ecojustice, an environmental law advocacy group, said.

For example, the ongoing NEB review of Trans Mountain has triggered a full on debate on where municipal by-laws and rights stand in relation to the powers of the NEB (not to mention a showdown on Burnaby Mountain last year).

The question of dilbit or diluted bitumen’s behaviour in water was brought to the fore largely because of the Northern Gateway hearings. Subsequent federal reports confirmed the substance sinks when mixed with sediment although recently-released government documents show just how little is known about the effects of dilbit when spilled into water.

For existing pipelines like Energy East, involvement in the NEB process means information that might otherwise be kept from the public becomes a matter of record.

Through information requests, participants in the Enbridge Line 9 hearings gained access to disconcerting information about the condition of the 40-year pipeline. Information requests also revealed Enbridge had failed to assess what would happen in the event of a pipeline rupture.

“New information is essential to driving a public narrative about the risks associated with these projects,” Berman said. 

Three thousand kilometers of the proposed Energy East pipeline travelling through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario is comprised of an existing TransCanada natural gas pipeline. If approved that gas line will be converted to carry heavy crude and dilbit. One thousand six hundred kilometers of additional pipe will be constructed in Quebec and New Brunswick to extend the line to export terminals.

NEB Is the Only Venue Canada Has To Discussion National Energy Projects

Outside the NEB, Canada simply has no alternate venue where national issues connected to new pipelines can be discussed, leading participants to argue for much-needed structural change.

“Although I do agree the NEB has become slanted towards approvals, it is important to have the public participate in and challenge the process in order to highlight the problems in need of fixing,” Nayler said.

Of particular concern is the NEB’s refusal to consider the climate impacts of pipelines. From the outset, the board deemed climate impacts, and especially upstream emissions from the Alberta oilsands, as outside the purview of public hearings on the Northern Gateway, Trans Mountain and Energy East pipelines.

At 1.1 million barrels-a-day, Energy East would increase oilsands or tar sands production in Alberta by at least one third. The energy-intensive oilsands are Canada’s fastest growing source of GHG emissions.

Recently the U.S. EPA acknowledged the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Alberta oilsands crude to export facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, would be the climate equivalent of adding 5.7 million new passenger cars to the road.

“The NEB is the only place we can try and be heard. Every other level of climate and environmental legislation has been removed by the Conservatives,” Cam Fenton, tar sands campaigner for 350.org, said.

350.org has launched an online campaign encouraging the public to apply to take part in the NEB process on Energy East, but explicitly on the grounds of addressing climate change – a demand that is likely to have consequences.

It was precisely for wanting to address climate change that the NEB denied the 27 experts mentioned above participation in the Trans Mountain public hearing process.

“We are going to force the NEB to reject all these people. We need to hold the NEB and the process accountable for not allowing people to speak about climate change,” Fenton told DeSmog Canada.

Over the last year, 350.org has collected one hundred thousand signatures from Canadians wanting the board to consider climate change in its Energy East decision.

Last week representatives traveled to Calgary to physically hand the petition to the NEB.

Image Credit: Light Brigading via Flickr, LeadNow, Greenpeace, TransCanada 

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With the federal government’s decision on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway oil tanker and pipeline proposal set to come in the next three weeks, the political hot potato is set to be launched back into B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s lap any day now.

Throughout 2012 and 2013, Clark doled out a lot of tough talk when it came to Northern Gateway, going so far as to tell The Globe and Mail that pushing ahead with the pipeline would spur a “national political crisis.”

“Whether or not people supported the pipeline, they would band together to fight the federal government if they decided to intrude into British Columbia without our consent,” she told the newspaper in October 2012.

“This project can only go ahead if it has the social licence to do so. It can only get the social licence from the citizens of British Columbia.”

Speaking to Calgary university students the same month, Clark pointed out the B.C. government could withhold 60 different permits or refuse to hook pumping stations up to the province’s electrical grid.

“The thing is if British Columbia doesn’t give its consent to this, there is no way the federal government or anyone else in the country is going to be able to force it through. It just won’t happen,” Clark said.

These statements don’t leave a whole lot of room for Clark to manoeuvre, especially considering the Globe recently reported that none of her five conditions for approving heavy oil pipelines have been met.

It’s a point that hasn’t been overlooked by B.C. environment and democracy campaigners. Earlier this month, Forest Ethics Advocacy launched a new campaign called Stand Strong Christy.

“Thousands of British Columbians from across the province are sending messages calling on Premier Clark to continue opposing Northern Gateway and standing up for our watersheds, coast and children’s future,” said Nikki Skuce, ForestEthics Advocacy senior energy campaigner.

“With Harper’s likely approval of the pipeline, we need our premier to stand with the majority of B.C. and push back on ever getting Northern Gateway built.”

Meanwhile, another B.C. group is organizing for a citizens’ initiative to put the Enbridge pipeline to an HST-style vote if Clark reverses her position on the project. Dogwood Initiative reports it has 75 local teams collecting petition signatures in advance of the federal government’s decision.

“For this pipeline to be built, First Nations along the route as well as a democratic majority of British Columbians would have to support the project. Neither appears likely,” said Kai Nagata, Dogwood’s energy and democracy director, in a press release.

And another campaign, led by LeadNow and ForestEthics Advocacy, is targeting the 21 Conservative MPs in British Columbia who could feel the electoral fall-out in the next election if the feds green-light Northern Gateway.

While the feds certainly deserve to feel some heat, it’s Clark who the spotlight is likely to shine brightest on in the short-term given her election promise to “put B.C. first” and “stand strong” on her five conditions.

When the Northern Gateway announcement comes down, British Columbians are going to look to Clark to put her money where her mouth is — and it’s hard to see how she’s going to hand off the hot potato this time around.

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A strange chain of events played out in the Vancouver Sun in the past couple of weeks. 

First, on Feb. 5, the newspaper ran the results of a poll commissioned by Dogwood Initiative and three other B.C. non-profits that found 64 per cent of British Columbians are opposed to bringing oil tankers into B.C.’s inside waters, including 50 per cent who are strongly opposed.

(Full disclosure: I’ve worked both for Dogwood Initiative and Postmedia, the company that owns the Vancouver Sun.)

Let’s get one thing straight right away: all polls should be taken with a grain of salt. Anyone who has followed the Enbridge Northern Gateway debate closely has watched all sides of the debate trot out surveys with vastly different results. They all claim their poll gave the respondents the undisputed facts and the people have spoken. And they’re all right — in a sense.

When Enbridge itself asks the question, they focus on the pipeline, ensure respondents know it’ll be underground (I'm sure they focus-grouped the living daylights out of that one) and include lots of technical detail about things like condensate. And when Enbridge asked the question that way in late 2011, they came out with a result indicating more British Columbians were in favour of the pipeline than against it (48 per cent to 32 per cent). What you don’t see in that result is how many different ways and different times they had to ask the question to get there.

On the flip side, when environmental groups ask the question, they tend to focus on oil tankers in inside coastal waters and the threat of an oil spill. And when they ask the question their way, they tend to find 65 per cent of British Columbians opposed to Enbridge’s oil tanker proposal. They too have honed in on how to ask the question to get the result they want, but they have a lot less money both to focus group questions and to poll continually until they get a desirable result.

Given the fickleness of any given polling result, the Vancouver Sun’s initial treatment of the latest Dogwood poll was fairly circumspect. While it didn’t give Enbridge a chance to respond directly to the findings, it did quote December’s B.C. Chamber of Commerce poll (PDF), which used Enbridge’s polling question, and analyzed the way the question was asked.  The sub-headline even read: “Results not surprising in survey commissioned by environmental groups.”

It should be noted that when the Vancouver Sun covered the release of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce poll, the results ran un-refuted — with nearly no analysis of the polling question and no response from environmental groups. (That poll found 47 per cent of British Columbians support the project and 44 per cent oppose it — a 12 per cent jump in opposition in the two years since Enbridge released its poll with exactly the same question. The Sun didn’t make that connection.)

So, here’s where things get weird: in response to the latest poll commissioned by enviros, Enbridge whipped up a two-minute video refuting its findings and released it exclusively to the Vancouver Sun on Saturday Feb. 8. The Vancouver Sun ran an entire story dedicated to Enbridge’s argument, including embedding the video on its website. The story had no commentary from the environmental groups who actually commissioned the poll.

Enbridge execs had their knickers in a twist because the poll referenced oil tankers entering the inside passage, which the company disputes. To be clear: oil tankers will cross through the inside passage and throughout B.C.’s inside coastal waters, but they won’t sail up and down the inside passage. Sure enough, the wording could have been better, but it hardly warranted the Sun running a two-minute video response, which was essentially an ad for Enbridge.

It seems the good folks over at the Vancouver Sun had that realization later on because the story that went to print on Tuesday Feb. 11 included fulsome rebuttals from both Dogwood Initiative and Justason Market Intelligence, rather than straight-up PR spin from Enbridge. The story noted that at the end of the poll, respondents were asked what type of organization they thought sponsored it — more than 50 per cent thought the research was sponsored by a group either in support of Enbridge’s proposal, or neutral. So while Enbridge may claim bias, the citizens involved in the poll didn’t get that sense.

A day after Enbridge’s attack on their poll, Dogwood Initiative invited Enbridge to collaborate on a new poll with them.

“In the spirit of the balanced and fair public conversation . . . Enbridge and Dogwood Initiative could develop a question that describes the full scope and location of the proposal and then work together with an independent polling organization to field it,” the statement says. “We could split the costs and release the results publicly. This is a sincere offer, and we hope Enbridge will accept.”

So far, Dogwood hasn’t heard back from Enbridge — and their challenge hasn’t received much attention. Perhaps newspaper editors are too embarrassed by the way it shines a light on the budget constraints that prevent them from commissioning their own polls these days?

I’m sure the Vancouver Sun’s spotty coverage of the polling debate has much more to do with a lack of resources and the rush to get stories online than it has to do with the millions of dollars Enbridge and the oil industry spends with Postmedia — but the optics aren’t good.

The poll fiasco went down in the same week Postmedia laid off its top environment reporter Mike De Souza as part of a downsizing of its parliamentary bureau and a leaked presentation gave indications of a slightly-too-cozy relationship between Postmedia and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Readers could be forgiven for wondering what exactly drove the Sun to embed Enbridge’s video rebuttal in its story. Perhaps the best way to find out for sure is for environmental groups to issue a video rebuttal to the Vancouver Sun the next time industry releases poll results — and then to sit back and wait for it to run in its entirety. It may not have the same production values as the Enbridge video, but surely the fact Enbridge neglects to mention oil tankers in inside coastal waters (the very issue British Columbians are most concerned about) is worthy of a response?

Image Credit: Kumravel via Flickr

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