NORTH BAY—A regional environmental organization in Northeastern Ontario is pointing to a report of the federal environmental commissioner on Tuesday as more cause for concern about TransCanada’s proposal to use an aging natural gas line across Northern Ontario to ship diluted bitumen and other crude oils from Alberta’s tar sands to the east coast.
“The National Energy Board (NEB) is not a trustworthy regulator,” stated Northwatch project coordinator Brennain Lloyd.
“The Energy East project is a high risk venture, with Northern Ontario bearing tremendous risks of pipeline failure along the 1,600 kilometres that cut from Kenora to the Ottawa Valley. Today’s report sets out pretty plainly that the NEB is failing to track or require compliance with regulators or approval conditions. This makes lakes, rivers and communities all along the line even more vulnerable to spills and ruptures due to pipeline failures.”
In her 2015 fall report tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, Julie Gelfand, presented the results of three audits which were completed in the fall of 2015, including an audit of the NEB’s oversight of federally regulated pipelines. The annual report on environmental petitions is also included in the commissioner’s fall report.
The commissioner’s overall finding was that “the National Energy Board’s tracking of company compliance with pipeline approval conditions was inadequate.” In addition, the audit found that tracking and documentation of pipeline approval conditions was inaccurate or out of date, key file documentation was missing, or the files lacked analysis in half of the cases examined. In 22 of 42 cases the board follow-up on deficiencies in company compliance with regulatory requirements was either inconsistent or improperly documented. The NEB has significant, system-wide challenges with the information management tools it used to track company compliance.”
“Our audit concluded that the National Energy Board did not adequately track companies implementation of pipeline approval conditions and that it was not consistently following up on company deficiencies. We found that the board’s tracking systems were outdated and inefficient,” said Ms. Gelfand.
The NEB received a 70,000 page application from TransCanada for the Energy East project in October 2014, but the NEB has not yet announced a hearing. In December 2015 TransCanada filed 10,000 additional pages of reports, but has still not provided all the information needed for a full project review.
