Battle brews over moratorium: British Columbia

Battle brews over whether moratorium should apply to oil-sands tanker traffic
Christopher Pollon, Globe and Mail, 24-Jul-2006

Oil tanker ban not written in stone, or anywhere else
Jack Knox, Victoria Times Colonist, 20-Jul-2006

VANCOUVER -- The recent appearance of large oil tankers in B.C. inside coastal waters is raising questions about whether a 34-year-old federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas development applies to new tanker traffic linked to the Alberta oil sands.

On June 24, a tanker carried 350,000 barrels of petroleum-based condensate, a product used to dilute bitumen mined in tar sands, travelling north through Caamano Sound into Douglas Channel and on to the deep-sea port at Kitimat, where the condensate was offloaded to a CN rail line.

The vessel was the second in two months to make the trip with such cargo, destined for EnCana's oil-sands operation in Alberta.

Critics say the tankers have no business carrying such cargo in those waters. At issue is whether the 1972 moratorium applies to tankers plying the 400-kilometre stretch of coastal waters between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Environmentalists and most northern coastal native communities say it does -- but governments and industry insist the moratorium refers only to exploration and drilling in those waters, not to tanker traffic.

"The moratorium was never designed to eliminate business into our ports on the West Coast," said Rich Neufeld, the provincial Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources.

"B.C. has been shipping crude oil out of our ports for years. It's been happening before, it's picking up now, and there's no doubt about it, there will be more."

But environmentalists say the tankers now coming into use are much larger than the ones that have plied the waters in years past.

"The federal moratorium applies to these tankers, and until there is overt recognition by the federal government that it is lifting the moratorium, those tankers should not go through," said Karen Campbell, legal counsel for the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental-policy research organization.

"As it stands now, there's no penalty for these ships because there's no written law with enforcement provisions."

The original moratorium restricted oil and gas exploration and development of millions of hectares of inside-coastal seabed.

In response to fears of accidents, it also barred Alaska-bound oil tankers from the Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound.

Natural Resources Canada says the 1972 moratorium is still in place but applies only to offshore oil and gas exploration and drilling. Transport Canada, the federal agency that oversees the transport and safety of dangerous goods by water, agrees.

Environmentalists argue that spill risks remain and that the federal government has quietly changed its stand on tanker traffic.

"Federal agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars on three separate panels regarding the moratorium since 2003," said Will Horter, executive director of a Victoria-based environmental group, the Dogwood Initiative. "All three refer very specifically to the moratorium applying to tankers through Hecate Strait, Queen Charlotte Sound and the Dixon Entrance."

Concerns have also been heightened by accidents involving tankers and large vessels, such as a February oil spill in Alaska's Cooke Inlet and the March sinking of a B.C. Ferries vessel, which has leaked up to 250,000 litres of diesel and lubrication oil off Hartley Bay.

"The sinking of the Queen of the North proves that a big ship can sink on the coast," said Walker Brown, a councillor with the Skidegate Band Council on the Queen Charlotte Islands. "We want to see as few tankers as possible here."

The federal and provincial governments say that the only restriction on tanker traffic now is a voluntary "tanker exclusion zone" established in a 1988 agreement between the U.S. and Canadian coast guards, governing vessels travelling down from Alaska to California and up through Juan de Fuca Strait.

"It was adopted to keep tankers outside of a boundary protecting the B.C. coastline in case something went amiss. It wouldn't apply to vessels coming in to Canadian ports like Kitimat," said Don Rodden, superintendent of environmental response for the Canadian Coast Guard's Pacific region.

The growing importance of Kitimat for tanker traffic was highlighted this month, when Premier Gordon Campbell announced $200,000 for a feasibility study on an additional port at Kitimat that could handle construction materials for oil-sands projects such as pipelines and refining facilities.

"The economic spinoffs [from shipping] will have a cascading effect in terms of new industry that will be attracted to the community," said Roger Harris, executive director of the Kitimat Port Development Society.

"Companies have lined up and told the Premier, 'We're about to make investments in your province, and if this infrastructure is not here, those investments will either be delayed or put at risk.' "

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Of course there's a moratorium on oil tankers in B.C.'s inside waters, says David Anderson. It just isn't written down.

And Anderson should know, being both a former federal environment minister and the guy who pushed Pierre Trudeau into implementing the ban 34 years ago.

This all comes as federal authorities ponder proposals to run pipelines between Kitimat and northern Alberta. The leading scheme, promoted by Enbridge, envisions twin 1,150-kilometre lines, one sending an oil-thinning fluid called condensate to Alberta, the other carrying tarsands oil to the coast, where it would be loaded onto tankers and shipped to Asia and the U.S. Pembina Pipeline has a separate, $1-billion proposal to pipe condensate from Kitimat to Alberta.

The tanker idea has environmentalists sputtering. It's in direct contravention of the federal moratorium on tanker traffic and oil and gas exploration in B.C.'s inside waters, they say.

Au contraire, replies Transport Canada. No such tanker moratorium exists. All we have is a voluntary exclusion zone, in which crude-carriers from Valdez, Alaska, agree to stay out of Hecate Strait, Queen Charlotte Sound and Dixon Entrance on their way to the continental U.S. The agreement was never meant to cover traffic in and out of Canadian ports, and, in fact, commercial vessels ranging from cruise ships to bulk carriers, fuel barges and coastal freighters plow through those waters all the time without incident. (And don't forget that, off Victoria, oil tankers pass through Juan de Fuca Strait several hundred times a year.)

This is where Anderson steps in. The former Liberal MP scoffs at the contention that no moratorium exists -- a convenient interpretation that frees the Conservative government from having to make the politically perilous decision to lift the prohibition. The moratorium may not be chiseled in stone, but its reality as public policy has been accepted by successive Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments since 1972, Anderson argues. "You don't need an order-in-council for government policy."

"The idea that somehow you can pretend it doesn't exist is stretching it a good deal."

Anderson has history here. As the feather-ruffling rookie MP for Esquimalt-Saanich in the early 1970s, he crusaded against the Alaska pipeline to Valdez and the shipping of oil down the B.C. coast in tankers. He was instrumental in persuading Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to implement the moratorium in 1972, and in the 1980s served as Premier Bill Vander Zalm's adviser on oil tanker traffic and spills. Last November, as he prepared to bow out as MP for Victoria, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee bestowed the Oil Free Coast Achievement Award upon him.

Anderson does not like the proposal to pipe oil to Kitimat and ship it 166 kilometres down Douglas Channel, right past the spot where Queen of the North sank in March. That disaster happened even though B.C. Ferries' crews know the waters well, unlike the crews of the foreign-flagged tankers that would carry the tarsands crude off to China. Allow those ships to sail, and you can expect two or three Exxon Valdez-type disasters over 30 years, Anderson says.

"The chances of an accident are far higher than with the B.C. Ferries fleet."

The benefits are dwarfed by the major risk to one of the last pristine stretches of coastline in the world, Anderson says. Think of what an oil spill would do to tourism, wildlife, the coastal economy. "I don't think it's worth it." And why are we in such a hurry to send our oil reserves off to China, he asks? This is a non-renewable resource. Oil that sold for $3.25 a barrel in 1972 goes for more than $70 now, and it's not about to get cheaper, or more plentiful. Plenty of people will be happy that Anderson no longer has a vote on this issue. In 2003, the Canadian Alliance called on him to resign as environment minister, calling him the only serious impediment to a safe and successful offshore oil and gas industry, while B.C. Energy Minister Richard Neufeld lumped him in with the "negative Nellies" blocking such development. Anderson even had to fight his own Liberal cabinet colleagues to maintain the moratorium. Enbridge is talking about $4 billion and 5,000 jobs for its project; that's a big boost for northern B.C.

With Anderson on the outside, and no one in government taking his place, you have to think the moratorium isn't worth the paper it's not written on.

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