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Northern
www.northernsentinel.com
Volume 61 No. 39
Court to hear Enbridge case Cameron Orr West Coast Environmental Law have provided an overview of what court challenges await Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipelines project. Since the federal government approval of the Northern Gateway project in 2014, a number of First Nations and other groups have filed challenges in the court. They are the Gitga’at First Nation, Gitxaala Nation, Haida Nation, Haisla Nation, Heiltsuk Nation, Kitasoo Xai’Xais Nation, Nadleh Whut’en; Nak’azdli, Whut’en, BC Nature, ForestEthics Advocacy Association, Living Oceans Society, Raincoast Conservation Foundation, and Unifor. The challenges cover a number of issues, such as wildlife: there are assertions at the Joint Review Panel contravened the Species at Risk Act in their decision. Other parts noted challenges to how the JRP assessed public interest. First Nation interests were also included. The report notes that the “Haisla argued that the JRP’s finding that construction and operation of the project would not have any significant adverse effects on the ability of First Nations to use lands, waters or resources for traditional purposes is unreasonable because it ignores the fact that construction of the marine terminal would permanently prevent Haisla members from using the lands and waters at and around that site.” West Coast Environmental Law says the entirety of the challenges to the JRP decision comprises 350 pages of documents. The arguments will be heard effectively at once, by the Federal Court of Appeal in Vancouver, over six days from October 1 and 2 then October 5 to 8.
Firefighters check out a building downtown.
/page 2 District’s Ec Dev in new office space.
/page 8 PM477761
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
1.30 INCLUDES TAX
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Dancing for peace Kildala Elementary School student dance for International Day of Peace during a school assembly. The Kitimat Rotary Club sponsors peace day in Kitimat, and the elementary school pitched in with their performance and a school photo on their field. See page 7 for more. Cameron Orr
LNG delays costing B.C. billions Cameron Orr A report from the Fraser Institute says delays getting B.C. liquefied natural gas projects to reality is costing the province billions of dollars. Among the information presented in the report, titled The Cost of Regulatory Delays, it says the International Energy Agency believes that no Canadian LNG project would start production by 2020, while 17 international projects are looking at starting by 2019 at the latest. “The magnitude of these lost export revenues should encourage policy makers to streamline the regulatory process so that British Columbia is able to make use of its large natural gas resources,” said a summary of the report, which was authored by Benjamin Zycher and Kenneth P. Green. The lost export revenue in 2020
could be $22.5 billion, according to the report. “The export revenues lost in 2020 would be equal to 9.5 per cent of British Columbia GDP in 2014,” the report says in its conclusion. Skeena MLA Robin Austin, who is also the Opposition Spokesperson for Northern Economic Development, told the Sentinel that delays in LNG are more a matter of political faults. “Delays do cost businesses money,” he said. “The trouble is the B.C. Liberals have been pushing this LNG not so much at the speed at which the market would decide but pushing it for political reasons.” He said the government’s efforts to get a final investment decision have been causing conflict especially in Aboriginal communities.
“The market will decide this thing because it has to make sense in terms of finding buyers at a price that is cost effective for them, to build a terminal and to build a pipeline. And prices have dramatically gone down since this whole thing started,” said Austin. As for these delays being something to think about for policy makers, as the report notes, Austin sees a different picture. “When you think of what the federal government has done to rip apart the federal environmental process to the point where people don’t have confidence in it you have to be careful. Streamlining, or as people in the government like to say ‘getting rid of red tape’ isn’t necessarily the right thing to do,” he said. “There is no economy without clean air, water and soil.”