In April 2024, the BC Energy Regulator (BCER) greenlit construction to begin on the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline in northern B.C. — bypassing a legal requirement to do an assessment of the cumulative effects that this would have on the environment and communities along its path.
The BCER is allowing construction of the 900-kilometre fracked gas pipeline to start as early as August 24, 2024.
That’s why Ecojustice is going to court on behalf of our clients, the Kispiox Band, the Kispiox Valley Community Centre Association, and the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, to demand the BCER follows its own rules and makes sure the pipeline’s impacts are fully and fairly considered before it’s rushed through. Our clients, who live along the proposed pipeline route, are concerned about the impacts of the project on their communities.
The permits that the BCER issued for the pipeline require that, before construction can legally begin, the BCER must conduct a cumulative effects assessment of the project. But instead of conducting an up-to-date assessment of the whole project, the BCER only considered a small section of the pipeline and relied on information from an environmental assessment that was a decade old — while also failing to include frontline communities in the assessment process.
The problem with a decade-old environmental assessment? Over the last ten years, the project plan, pipeline route, watersheds, and communities in the pipeline’s route have changed — all while climate impacts have worsened. There a more frequent and severe droughts and wildfires in the region, and continued industrial development in northern B.C. has made sensitive ecosystems and endangered species’ populations (including salmon and caribou) more vulnerable There’s no way the BCER can claim it knows the cumulative effects this project will have on communities and the environment when its data on this pipeline is more than ten years old.
The project approval process has been shrouded in secrecy and frontline communities have been left out of the decision-making process. They deserve to have their concerns about the project’s impact on their lives, livelihoods and the environment addressed.
What we’re fighting for:
- On behalf of the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, Kispiox Valley Community Centre Association, and Kispiox Band (a Gitxsan community), we’re demanding that the BCER follow its own rules and conduct a new cumulative effects assessment on the whole project before construction starts on the pipeline.
- We also demand that frontline communities, who have been left out of the decision-making process, have a chance to have their concerns about the project’s impact on their lives, livelihoods and the environment addressed.
