Ian Gill: At the TMX Pipeline Hearing, the Sham of ‘Consultation’ Laid Bare. Canada ‘barged ahead’ with what ‘cannot be in the public interest,’ argue First Nations. Vancouver Harbour is the terminus for the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project, or TMX. If completed, the pipeline’s threefold increase in capacity promises a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic. That in turn raises the threat level of a catastrophic spill of diluted bitumen into a waterway that is, among other things, critical habitat in the traditional territories of the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish First Nations.
Those nations oppose the approval of TMX, as do several others, including the Coldwater Indian Band, located inland just south of the town of Merritt. The Coldwater’s opposition stems from a threat to an aquifer which is the main source of its members’ drinking water. (The band’s complaints were documented extensively by The Tyee in October.)
In Courtroom 601 of Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal in downtown Vancouver this week, three judges presided over a judicial review of the decision by the Trudeau government in June to approve the pipeline.
Before them were 27 black-robed lawyers (and a few more in civilian clothing) who outnumbered the peasantry in the packed courtroom (an overflow crowd watched a patchy video stream in a room two floors above).
The lawyers lined up on either side of a chasm that continues to exist between a national government that is impossibly conflicted by its position as both owner and regulator of the pipeline, and Indigenous peoples for whom that same government has fiduciary and constitutional obligations.
It is a chasm made wider by the fact that many First Nations simply don’t agree with Canada’s interpretation of what constitutes the “national interest” — TMX being Exhibit A.
Put simply, Canada chose in June to give regulatory approvals to a project it owns, having satisfied itself that its consultation with First Nations was good enough — even though several of them claim the government flat out ignored their issues, again, and even tampered with peer-reviewed science that supported their concerns about the environmental risks posed by TMX.
So right now, the pipeline is being built. Canada has “barged ahead” with the project, according to Tsleil-Waututh First Nation counsel Scott Smith, even though the most contentious issues brought by First Nations remain unresolved.
Cam Brewer, a lawyer for the Coldwater Indian Band, told the court, “What we have is a decision that cannot be honourable and cannot be in the public interest.”
The Tsleil-Waututh First Nation argue for instance that it is not in the public interest to entertain the risk of what Smith called a “black swan event” if tarsands dilbit were to spill into the harbour or into the waters of the nearby Georgia Strait — concerns that stemmed from expert reports they commissioned and presented to the government.
In their submission to the court, they say that unbeknownst to them, Canada had its own experts review their reports, and when the government’s own experts “substantially agreed” with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation’s, the government withheld that fact from them during consultations.
“Canada instead took positions contrary to those of its own scientists,” Tsleil-Waututh First Nation told the court. Only after the consultation period ended did the government provide its reviews to the First Nation, whose examination of draft and final reviews revealed “that the conclusions within were altered to advocate for project re-approval.”
Smith said in court that the reviews that concurred with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation’s concerns were “altered by unknown persons.”
Not so, said government lawyer Dayna Anderson, who also said the government was under no obligation to provide what it considered to be an internal review to the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation in the first place.
“In no way did Canada attempt to suppress or alter scientific information,” she said. “To the contrary, Canada has been extremely transparent.”
What aggravated the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation was that their experts and government scientists agreed no one knows enough about what dilbit will do when spilled, and that that was something that should be tested and studied. Hardly rocket science, or as Smith put it to justices Noël, Pelletier and Laskin, “We’re not landing spaceships on the moon here.”
Actually, that’s been done already.
No comments:
Post a Comment