Kinder Morgan doesn’t want 'Columbo' to intervene in Burnaby

A sensitive conservation area at the end of its pipeline route could toss a wrench in Kinder Morgan's plans to build the controversial Trans Mountain expansion project through British Columbia.

During pipeline hearings in Burnaby, B.C., a lawyer for the municipality accused the Texas-based company of routing its pipeline through the city's Brunette River Conservation Area, and failing to perform an environmental assessment on it for the City of Burnaby.

Legal counsel Gregory McDade — who has previously told Canada's federal pipeline regulator that the Trans Mountain expansion is a "rapacious," ill-conceived project — challenged Kinder Morgan to produce the assessment on Tuesday.

McDade repeatedly pressed Kinder Morgan to reveal whether it knowingly outlined its final pipeline route through the conservation area, which was outlined in the City of Burnaby's official community plan. At one point, one of Kinder Morgan's lawyers, Martin Ignasiak, shot back, "This isn’t an episode of Columbo,” arguing that not every question can be answered with a definitive 'yes' or 'no.'

The company's representative, Thanh Nguyen, was unable to provide documents that fit Burnaby's eight-bullet criteria of what constituted an environmental impact assessment.

“We believe that assessment was part of (a previous) application,” Nguyen told the National Energy Board (NEB) panelists at the hearing. “While I don’t have that reference now, I can find it for you.”

McDade suggested the document doesn't exist, while Nguyen said it it was part of a larger application that was filed by the company.

The company declined to respond to National Observer's questions about Brunette River on Tuesday, but submitted a document the next day to the NEB. McDade said on Wednesday it wasn't the environmental assessment that he had asked for.

"That's not an actual environmental assessment for Brunette River," McDade told National Observer. "If you look at it, you'll see they just put together a bunch of different PDFs from the previous work they did around Brunette River... I'd asked a few times about it yesterday, and at the end of it, [Nguyen] admitted they didn't have (that part of) the environmental assessment," he said.

He said the document uploaded to the NEB this morning was not shared with the City of Burnaby for consideration. Kinder Morgan did not respond to a request to comment on McDade's allegations before publication time.

McDade lawyer said the company did not adequately engage with the City of Burnaby around the pipeline's impact on conservation areas before finalizing its pipeline route.

Burnaby wants to protect its waters

The Brunette River Conservation Area is a cherished community park with a four-kilometre walking trail through wilderness at the edge of one of Canada's arterial highways. The protected area connects Burnaby Lake to the Fraser River, and its rich, peaty soils were once the winter home of the Kwantlen First Nation.

It attracted some of Burnaby’s first homesteaders, and after decades of industrial decay, a coalition of environmental groups with Metro Vancouver were thrilled to see the return of salmon in recent years to the Brunette River and its tributaries.

Elmer Rudolph, president of the Sapperton Fish and Game Club, has helped nurse the region back to health, and said Trans Mountain is taking a major risk by running its pipeline as close as 30 metres from the water.

“If there is any kind of spill or leakage, even if it doesn’t spill overland, it’s virtually within the aquifer of the river,” Rudolph told National Observer in an interview. “The oil will seep into the ground, and at that point it will leach into the river continually, even if they had some sort of major cleanup. And that would be a minor spill.”

The Trans Mountain expansion is a $7.9-billion proposal to add 980 kilometres of new infrastructure to an existing pipeline system, tripling its capacity to pump 890,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to a marine terminal in Burnaby.

Supporters of the project, which was approved by the federal government in November 2016, argue that it is needed to create jobs, bring Albertan oil to tidewater, and boost provincial economies that have struggled with slumping oil prices. Trans Mountain has previously said the pipeline can operate safely through strict adherence to more than 150 environmental, financial and technical conditions.

Its representatives declined to provide additional comments for this story, and told National Observer that they had nothing to add to the legal comments made during Tuesday's hearings.

The City of Burnaby's fierce opposition to the Trans Mountain expansion, which would boost oil tanker traffic in local waters by up to 600 per cent, has prompted Kinder Morgan to seek intervention from the NEB to help it speed up the construction process. The municipality has delayed granting the company's construction permits to build — delays the company argues have resulted in millions of dollars in losses.

The NEB, which has the powers of a federal court, has agreed to some of Kinder Morgan's requests, including the introduction of a new process to fast-track the review of company complaints. But McDade, lawyer for Burnaby, argues that the regulator is stripping the municipality's powers to protect public safety, the environment and the economy.

On Tuesday, he grilled Trans Mountain’s vice-president of operations, Michael Davies about the pipeline route through the Brunette Conservation Area. Davies said Trans Mountain looked at Burnaby’s official maps before finalizing its route, and that based on those maps, its pipeline did not intersect the conservation area, but runs parallel to it.

Trans Mountain opts for cheaper methods

During the hearing, NEB representatives said Trans Mountain's pipeline has already been approved, and is not open for debate. But McDade zoomed in on Trans Mountain’s plans to clear-cut the pipeline route where it intersects two waterways in the conservation area.

Davies responded that one of the issues that drove the company to use open-cut construction was the pullback — the final step of trenchless drilling, when heavy equipment is needed to drag the pipe into its final position.

Trans Mountain conceded that isolated open-cut was cheaper than trenchless drilling, but in either case, trenchless drilling was “not feasible,” and would not necessarily be better for the environment.

“If trenchless were feasible here, there would be restoration, but just in different locations,” Davies said.

The Sapperton Fish and Game Club believes there is a feasible, environmentally-sound way to build the pipeline, even through the bed of the Brunette River.

“There are things they could do, but at least in the conversation that I’ve had with them, they’re not particularly interested in doing them,” Rudolph said. He proposed “double-piping” the area, like in a double-hulled tanker, which helps significantly reduce the probability of a leak or spill, in the places the pipeline runs closest to the Brunette and Fraser Rivers.

“When we mentioned that to them, their response was, ‘Well, that would be expensive,’” he said.

— With files from Ed Ngai and Mike De Souza