Twenty years ago, a memorandum of understanding was signed with the goal of building a pipeline from Alberta’s oilsands to British Columbia’s northern coast.
Known as the Gateway Pipeline, the project was touted by Calgary-based Enbridge and state-owned PetroChina as a way to bring Alberta’s burgeoning oilsands production across the Pacific Ocean to meet surging Chinese demand.
The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding in 2005, agreeing in principle to a plan that would see up to 400,000 barrels per day of crude oil transported 1,160 kilometres from northern Alberta through rugged mountain terrain to a deep-sea terminal on B.C.’s northern coast, either in Kitimat or Prince Rupert. The companies planned to figure out the exact details later.
At the time, speed was of the essence. Oil prices were rising and production in Alberta’s oilsands was rapidly expanding. PetroChina wanted roughly half of the pipeline’s capacity. Enbridge hoped to have regulatory approval in place by 2006 and see crude oil start to flow by late 2009 or early 2010.
That, of course, turned out to be a pipe dream.
In July 2007, Chinese officials expressed frustration with delays and abruptly withdrew support for the project.
It was the first of many setbacks for the proposed pipeline, which would later become known as Northern Gateway.
But even as PetroChina’s support wavered, Enbridge pressed on.
What followed was a decade-long, fractious debate over the economy, the environment, and the constitutional foundations of the country. Over that time, Canadians witnessed passionate protests, oil spills, landmark court decisions, governments rise and fall, the involvement of the national spy agency and even a Tim Hortons boycott. All the while, the world was watching. The BBC described the Northern Gateway saga as a “fight for Canada’s soul.”
The details of that fight may have faded in memory. But they take on a renewed relevance today, as a new memorandum of understanding is signed – this time between Ottawa and the Government of Alberta – for a new vision of a pipeline through B.C.
As we set off on a new round of national debate, it can be instructive to look back at the life and death of the Northern Gateway proposal.
Terms of reference – and engagement
In the officialdom of Canada’s regulatory systems, the Northern Gateway saga began in December 2009.
That’s when the National Energy Board and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency issued terms of reference for regulatory review and a Joint Review Panel Agreement.
It wasn’t until May 2010 that Enbridge submitted its project application, and the actual regulatory hearings wouldn’t begin for more than a year after that.
But pipeline opponents were already lining up their resistance.
First Nations leaders organized protests in downtown Vancouver in December 2010, marching to Enbridge headquarters to deliver a signed declaration outlining their opposition to the pipeline.
In January 2011, the review panel requested more information from Enbridge, citing the scale of the pipeline and the complexity of the landscape it would need to travel through.
Meanwhile, more than 4,300 individuals and groups registered to speak at the regulatory hearings, which were set to take place over a year and a half across B.C. and Alberta.
The first hearing was held in Kitimat, B.C., in January 2012, and hundreds of people showed up. Some supported the pipeline, saying the region needs jobs. Others, particularly Indigenous people, expressed fears over the dual risks of a pipeline leak and oil-tanker spill, which they worried could damage the area’s sensitive ecosystems and threaten the way of life they have maintained for generations.
At the time, Haisla Hereditary Chief Ken Hall said it was like staring down “a double-barrelled shotgun.”
Similar, tense gatherings played out in communities across B.C. as the hearings continued. The review panel cancelled one hearing in Bella Bella over safety concerns for its members, after they were greeted by a group of protesters at the island community’s small airport.
As all this played out through the spring of 2012, polling suggested public opinion was increasingly turning against the pipeline proposal.
For Enbridge, things got even worse that summer.
Oil spills and ‘Keystone Kops’
In July 2012, a U.S. government agency affirmed the conclusions of a damning investigation into a leak from an Enbridge pipeline two years earlier.
The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the company knew about cracks in a pipe that led to a 2010 leak, which saw more than three million litres of oil spill into a Michigan river and cost more than $800 million to clean up.
“Learning about Enbridge’s poor handling of the rupture, you can’t help but think of the Keystone Kops,” board chair Deborah Hersman said at the time, referring to the woefully incompetent, fictional police officers that featured in slapstick comedies of the silent-film era.
A few weeks later, another Enbridge pipeline leaked in the U.S., spilling nearly 200,000 litres into a Wisconsin field, bringing even more negative attention onto the company and the Northern Gateway proposal.
Around the same time, the B.C. government announced five new requirements it would put in place before granting its approval of any pipelines and demanded a greater share of any revenues generated from Northern Gateway.
Adding further to Enbridge’s summer of discontent was another poll, this one showing 59 per cent of British Columbians opposed Northern Gateway and hardline opponents outnumbering hardline supporters by a margin of five to one.
Even members of the federal Conservative government, which was generally supportive of the pipeline proposal, started to acknowledge the public-relations challenges.
James Moore, a B.C. MP and senior member of prime minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet at the time, told a radio program in Vancouver in August 2012 that doubts about the Northern Gateway project are “widespread, given the behaviour of Enbridge recently.”
Regulatory approval vs. ‘social licence’
As the regulatory hearings came to an end the following year, the scale of the public opposition had become well apparent.
Ahead of a final public meeting in Terrace, B.C., Roger Harris, a former Enbridge vice-president, said the company mishandled the public engagement process and, even if the review panel ultimately approves the project, Enbridge lacks the social licence to build Northern Gateway.
“The misconception here is that having a legal permit to build something does not necessarily translate into the actual ability to construct a pipeline,” he told CBC News in June 2013.
“What’s happened for Enbridge over the course of recent history is they’ve lost the credibility, so that even if they were doing things in all the right ways, people either, one, don’t believe them, or two, they don’t care anymore.”
With a strict end-of-year deadline imposed on it by the federal government, the Joint Review Panel wrapped up its process in December 2013 and recommended approval of the pipeline project — with 209 conditions attached.
“After weighing the evidence, we concluded that Canada and Canadians would be better off with the Enbridge Northern Gateway project,” the panellists wrote.
That left the ball in Ottawa’s court and, in June 2014, Harper’s government approved the project, subject to the regulators’ conditions.
Enbridge CEO Al Monaco welcomed the approval but acknowledged it was just “one more step in the process” and said “we have more work ahead of us,” in particular when it comes to the concerns raised by the B.C. government and Indigenous communities.
Through the latter half of 2014, however, the company was relatively quiet when it came to the project, prompting speculation in early 2015 that Northern Gateway was quietly being shelved.
Meanwhile, further public backlash was brewing.
It was revealed in March 2015 that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had helped the federal government prepare for protests against the pipeline, which human rights advocates argued was outside the spy agency’s mandate.
Public pressure also prompted Tim Hortons to pull Enbridge ads from their in-restaurant televisions, which in turn prompted a scolding from Alberta politicians and a pledge from some Albertans to boycott the coffee chain.
Public relations challenges aside, the Northern Gateway project was about to face even larger hurdles, in court and in Parliament.
‘Real change’ and other pipelines
On Oct. 1, 2015, the Federal Court of Appeal began its longest hearing in modern history.
Eighteen separate legal challenges over Northern Gateway’s approval were consolidated into one “mega-hearing” in a courtroom in Vancouver, which was set to span six days.
The legal wrangling played out against the backdrop of a looming federal election.
The Oct. 19 vote saw the Liberal Party of Canada resurge from its distant-third-party status, gain 148 seats and form a majority government.
Justin Trudeau, the newly elected prime minister, said Canadians had sent a clear message that it’s “time for change in this country, my friends. Real change.”
For Northern Gateway, change didn’t take long.
Less than a month after his election victory, Trudeau called for a moratorium on crude oil tanker traffic along B.C.’s northern coast. Pipeline opponents celebrated the move as effectively killing the project.
Another nail was hammered into the project’s coffin with a B.C. Supreme Court decision in January 2016, which ruled that the provincial government “breached the honour of the Crown by failing to consult” with the Gitga’at and other Coastal First Nations when it agreed to a joint review process, rather than parallel federal and provincial reviews.
Meanwhile, Enbridge was struggling to move the project forward and in May 2016 asked regulators for a three-year extension on the deadline to start building.
Then came the heaviest blow to the beleaguered project.
In June 2016, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the approval of the Northern Gateway project, finding Ottawa failed to properly consult First Nations affected by the pipeline.
A few months later, Trudeau’s government said it wouldn’t appeal the decision.
So, in November 2016, it was effectively a formality: Trudeau and his cabinet announced the rejection of the Northern Gateway project, while simultaneously approving two other pipeline proposals: Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion and Enbridge’s Line 3.
The aftermath
While pipeline opponents celebrated the defeat of Northern Gateway, others mourned the loss of an opportunity.
Though many First Nations, especially those near the coast, were strongly opposed to the project, other Indigenous communities had supported the pipeline and looked forward to it being built.
“Their expectations were really raised with the promise of $2 billion set aside in business and employment opportunities,” Elmer Ghostkeeper of the Buffalo Lake Métis Settlement in Alberta told the Financial Post in 2017.
“Equity was offered to Aboriginal communities, and with the change in government that was all taken away. We are very disappointed in this young government.”
In Kitimat, where the Northern Gateway’s first public hearing was held, Mayor Phil Germuth felt the project’s demise had become inevitable.
“I think most people had that feel that it would never happen.”
