There’s a certain irony in the fact that Federal Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver started 2012 with an outrageous attack on people who oppose the Enbridge pipeline when Time Magazine named the “Protester” as the “person of the year” for 2011.
I’m still not sure what the Federal Conservatives hoped to gain from labeling legitimate protests against the Enbridge project “radical anti-development ideology.” Hopefully the significant backlash against the government’s attempted interference with the National Energy Board hearings on this pipeline will make them think twice about continuing this nonsensical and dishonorable tactic.
However, the U.S. rejection of the Keystone pipeline will now put more pressure on the Canadian government to find a way to get tar sands bitumen to China, either through the Enbridge pipeline to Kitimat or the expansion of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline to Vancouver. It’s therefore more likely that the Harper government will pull out all the stops to ensure they can approve one or both of these pipelines.
Which begs the question of what is the legitimate role for government in approving major development projects – projects that may provide short-term economic benefits while posing serious and generational risks to our health and safety and the environment. It certainly shouldn’t be to presuppose the outcome, or worse, to engineer a positive outcome.
Simply put, the government’s role should be to ensure that a process is put in place to ensure that all of the public concerns are heard and addressed, not to be a promoter for the private sector proponent and its shareholders. If, during an open and transparent process, there are public concerns expressed that prove a project’s risk far outweighs any short-term economic benefits, then it is incumbent on the government to say no to such projects.
That’s why we should all be concerned that both the Provincial and Federal governments’ are talking about “streamlining” the regulatory process to make it easier to approve major projects. This is a distortion of the role of government, its job is not to make it “easier” for proponents to get to “yes”.
Besides, streamlining the regulatory process to try and get to a yes faster won’t work for two reasons: 1) weakened regulations and weak public process will simply bog these projects down in the courts; and 2) it does not address the unresolved issue of First Nations rights and title.
Ultimately, the government’s job is to ensure we have a regulatory environment and approval process that protects the public interest for generations.