By Trevor Jang for Discourse Media.

Opponents of a massive liquefied natural gas project proposed for the north coast of B.C. have dug up a scientific report that band members were never shown.

In January of this year the Lax Kw’alaams Band signed an impact benefit agreement worth approximately $1 billion over 40 years in exchange for support for the $36 billion Pacific Northwest LNG project. But documents filed in federal court last month show the band council suppressed scientific research it had commissioned when the research report did not support the band’s position on the project. Members of the Gitwilgyoots Tribe, who filed the documents, are also arguing the band has no authority to approve the project.

“I don’t believe that they’re very ethical with the way that they’re doing things,” Murray Smith, a spokesperson for the Gitwilgyoots, tells me. “Why won’t [they] show us [the report]? Because it would work against them.”

The Gitwilgyoots launched their court challenge last October to have the federal government’s approval of the LNG facility overturned. Then in March, the Lax Kw’alaams Band filed a response to have the tribe’s challenge overturned.

Pacific Northwest LNG has been controversial because of its proposed location on Lelu Island near Prince Rupert. The island sits next to a sandbar called Flora Bank, which contains tall eelgrass that protects juvenile salmon as they adjust from the fresh water of the Skeena River to the salt water of the Pacific Ocean. Opponents of the project fear it will cause devastating impacts to the nursing grounds of millions of salmon and other species.

The report suppressed by the Lax Kw’alaams Band says the location of the project is a key concern. It was written by Asit Mazumder, a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Victoria. According to court documents, Mazumder was contracted by the band in the spring of last year to conduct an independent review of the project’s risk to fish and fish habitat in the Skeena River estuary.

Mazumder has not responded to requests for comment. But his report concluded that the research paid for by Pacific Northwest LNG, which informed the federal government leading up to Ottawa’s approval of the project, was “inconsistent.” It said the company’s modelling assumptions and lack of baseline data “make it difficult to conclude the project is at a low risk of significantly impacting Flora Bank.”

Mazumder wrote that the purpose of his report was to help Lax Kw’alaams band members “come to an informed judgement as to the likely safety of the project.” Lax Kw’alaams Mayor John Helin did not respond to requests for comment, but on April 21st he testified in a cross-examination that he didn’t share Mazumder’s report with the community. “I felt the road that he was going down was not an objective or independent review of all the necessary information that was out there,” Helin testified.  

"An Extremely Sad Experience for the Scientists"

Professor Mazumder’s was not the only science to be suppressed in the months leading up to the approval of the project. Geologist Patrick McLaren is President of SedTrend, an independent consulting firm specializing in sediment trend analysis. McLaren was hired by the Lax Kw’alaams Band in 2015 to evaluate the environmental effects of terminal development over Flora Bank.

His research concluded plans for development would have a disruptive effect on Flora Bank, and that the sediments there are ancient and irreplaceable. Then last September, just weeks before the federal government approved Pacific Northwest LNG, McLaren was served a cease and desist letter from the band warning him to stop “making references to any research, information, or other matters relating to our about your work with the Lax Kw’alaams Band.

“All of a sudden Dr. McLaren’s analysis disappeared. They never showed it again,” Smith recalls.

The letter came after McLaren wrote a memo to band members last July summarizing his concerns. This memo was read out at a community meeting in which members accused the band of spreading misinformation. McLaren says he was asked by concerned band members to write the memo, and that he was not allowed to attend the community meeting himself.

“It was an extremely sad experience for the scientists. I think we were all very distressed,” McLaren tells me in a recent interview.

The band’s letter called McLaren’s memo to band members “egregious” because it “appears to be clearly aimed at swaying the membership’s opinion.” The letter also accused McLaren of breaching his confidentiality provision in his contract with the band by writing the memo. McLaren argues he could speak out because his research was made public when it was submitted to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

“All the science that had been done had been published in international literature with people that have got nothing to do with Lax Kw’alaams, nothing to do with Flora Bank, only to do with assessing whether the scientific method and the results were reasonable. And if they weren’t, there wouldn’t have been [any] hope of having that published,” says McLaren.

The letter warned McLaren not to share or refer to any of his previous work done for the band publicly, adding that if he did, the band would take steps against him.

Suppressed Science Report Questioned Location of #PNWLNG Plant https://t.co/Cwr84uUGHR #cdnpoli #bcpoli @SkeenaWild @SkeenaWatershed pic.twitter.com/eMbWjmzf7r

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) June 8, 2017

Battle over Lelu Island continues

Mazumder’s report and the letter to McLaren were submitted as evidence in the ongoing legal battle to stop Pacific Northwest LNG. The submissions on behalf of the hereditary leaders of the Gitwilgyoots Tribe accuse the Lax Kwa’laams Band of “producing decision-based evidence rather than evidence-based decisions.”

The Gitwilgyoots are attempting to have the federal government’s approval of the project overturned, on the claim that the tribe and its hereditary leaders were not adequately consulted. The tribe claims Lelu Island and the surrounding area as its traditional territory.

But the Lax Kw’alaams Band also claims jurisdiction over Lelu Island and is attempting to have the tribe’s court challenge dismissed. The band is arguing that the tribe, which represents the hereditary governance system of the Lax Kw’alaams and broader Coast Tsimshian people, is not a legal entity and therefore did not need to be consulted.

The outcome of the case could have broad implications for the question of who can speak for First Nations: hereditary chiefs or the elected council of federally administered Indian Act bands.

The two sides return to federal court June 7 and 8 in Vancouver.

Image: Juvenile salmon in the Skeena estuary. Photo: Tavish Campbell

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It describes a framework but could just as easily be read as a request: open science.

And it’s something top of mind for Canadian scientists right now as the federal government is considering changes to the very way science is used to make major decisions about things like pipelines, oil and gas development and mines.

The ongoing federal review of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act is a huge opportunity to restore scientific integrity to decision-making, scientist Aerin Jacob told DeSmog Canada.

“I really can’t underscore how big an opportunity this is,” Jacob, Liber Ero postdoctoral scholar at the University of Victoria, said, adding Canada could transform the very way science feeds into the environmental assessment and decision-making process.

“One of the challenges being a scientist in wanting to evaluate government’s decisions is that we can’t see the evidence. We can’t see how decisions are being made.”

“It’s like a black box of decision-making. That’s not scientifically rigorous.”

In a conference meeting room in Nanaimo recently, Jacob had the chance to tell the federally appointed review panel how an environmental assessment could be improved by opening up science, not just to the greater scientific community, but to the public.

“All the information from an environmental assessment should be permanently and publicly available,” she said.

“This is more than having binders physically in a library or documents on a server.”

Other participants who presented to the federal review panel pointed to specific examples of when a lack of transparency was detrimental to the environmental review process.

Patrick McLaren, a geologist and expert sediment analyst, participated in the environmental assessment process for the controversial Pacific Northwest LNG terminal proposed for the coast of British Columbia. The project received federal approval in September.

McLaren, who was hired by local First Nations to provide scientific analysis of Flora Bank, a unique eelgrass estuary which provides resting grounds for juvenile salmon in the Skeena watershed, said he was consistently prevented from knowing what specific information the project’s proponent Petronas, and their private consultants, were using to determine no impacts would be made to salmon as a result of the project.

“In my research I came to the conclusion that the design of the terminal would probably result in Flora Bank being totally lost,” McLaren told the panel.

But when McLaren asked what information Petronas used to make the assertion no harm would be done to salmon, he was boxed out.

“I was precluded from asking the modelers questions,” he told the panel, adding that the data that challenged Petronas’ conclusions was not used in the decision-making process nor made public.

“The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans kept the data that did not support their conclusions secret…it was not put into the public domain because it was contrary to the ‘no harm’ mantra that was coming out of the modeling work.”

The Pacific Northwest LNG environmental assessment process, which scientists have called flawed and inadequate, is currently being legally challenged through multiple court cases.

Open Science: Can Canada Turn the Tide on Transparency in Decision-Making? https://t.co/mpZFb6dwUb #cdnpoli #environmental #assessments

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) December 21, 2016

Adam Ford, Canadian chair of wildlife ecology and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, worked as a consultant on numerous environmental assessments in Alberta and British Columbia and said the lack of transparency around data plagues the environmental review process.

“I have created something of a wish list for the environmental assessment panel after years of being involved in these reviews and seeing the same problems come up over and over again,” Ford said.

One of the requests submitted to the panel is to increase transparency and reproducibility of findings in environmental impacts assessments.

“In this process they collect data, but it’s tricky because it’s collected by private companies that keep their data and methods secret,” Ford told DeSmog Canada.

“It would be good to see more meta-data on how they collected this data.”

Ford said if all participants in the process were to make their methodologies and findings public it would help standardize the research being done in these ecosystems and landscapes.

It would also help increase accountability by allowing other scientists to understand and retest any conclusions made.

“In other scientsits’ sampling efforts, for example, we could go to those same places and look at the data they collected, ask them ‘how did you choose these samples, when and why?’ We could try to reproduce their findings.”

“But those standards aren’t there and this research is treated as proprietary.”

Ford said from a scientific and peer-review perspective this lack of transparency undermines the integrity of public environmental assessments by not standing up to the expectations of scientific rigour.

Furthermore, he said, not sharing research is simply inefficient. Scientists end up having to do the exact same research over again for environmental assessments because they can’t access the basic information that went into prior reviews.

“If they just shared the data it would help scientists.”

“There are efficiencies to be had throughout this transparency initiative — that’s where Western science is headed. Science is moving us to a more transparent process.”

When thinking about where Western science is headed, Jacob said Canada now has the opportunity to not only modernize its review process but become a world leader in forward-thinking environmental assessments.

“Beyond the raw data we want to see the reproducible code used to analyze it,” Jacob told the review panel.

“This is the recipe we use to come up with conclusions,” Jacob said, showing a chart with raw spreadsheet data on the left and reproducible code for analyzing data on the right.

“It’s not good enough to say ‘I pressed 10 buttons, this is the result I got.’ You need to have other people be able to plug that into their own computer and get the same result.”

It might look complex, Jacob said, “But now kids in High School are learning how to do this.”

Opening up the science to review by other scientists, opening up methods and raw data to the public — all of this is “done in a spirit of making the process stronger,” Jacob said.

“It blows my mind this is not already part of environmental assessments. This would be so easy to implement.”

She added the default for scientists and officials involved in the review process “ought to be sharing information.”

“This is the standard,” Jacob said. “This is a part of a next generation environmental assessment.”

Image: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Photo: Prime Minister’s Photo Gallery

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