I’m excited to be heading to the Enbridge AGM in Calgary on May 8 on behalf of West Coast.  I’ll be accompanying a  diverse group of concerned community members from the BC North Coast and from Alberta, including commercial fishers, farmers, youth and representatives of the Wet’suwet’en Tsayu (Beaver) and Laksilyu (Small Frog) Clans, as well as members of environmental NGOs and organized labour. The message we will deliver to the new CEO Al Monaco and the Enbridge Board is that they need an exit strategy: the Northern Gateway project is not going to be built, and hanging on will generate more liability for shareholders and investors.

The BC New Democratic Party released its election platform on Wednesday (April 24th), the last of the four main parties to release its platform. What? You don’t have time to read yet another election platform?  Well today is your lucky day, because this environmental law alert summarizes the platforms of the NDP, the Liberals, the Greens and the Conservatives into 4 handy, easy to look at word clouds.

Well, the writ’s been dropped and this Environmental Law Alert post is brought to you by the West Coast Environmental Law Association, sponsor under the Elections Act.  We do understand the value of regulating advertising that is intended to sway elections, but the BC Elections Act is prohibiting communications on broad public issues based not on whether those communications are intended to impact the election, but on whether the parties and candidates have taken positions on those issues.  In our view, this is having a chilling effect on public discussion at the very time when we most need public discussion. 

Last Thursday, April 4th the National Energy Board (NEB) announced that anyone who wished to comment on Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline proposal in Central Canada even by simply writing a letter would need to fill out a 10 page application form within 2 weeks.  This is, of course, absurd, since it will take the NEB far longer to review these 10 page applications and decide who will be allowed to write a letter, then it would have taken to read the letters. While the NEB says this new form is in response to Bill C-38 and the new CEAA 2012, in our view, it is still open to the NEB to adopt a more open process in relation to its decisions under the NEB Act – both in relation to Line 9 and generally.  Public participation is a good thing!