Dave Rutherford took a ride through the Whaleback with Environment Minister Jim Prentice and several local ranchers. He learned all about the value of the landscape and watershed and saw it with his own eyes. To say he was blown away is an understatement.
Listen to what he had to say on his first day back on the job.
http://www.am770chqr.com/station/audiovault.aspx
Enter July 27 and 9 am.
Native elder Cassie Lefthand, 81, is one of many Eden Valley residents who fear that Petro-Canada’s proposed pipeline and sour gas development will be situated too close to their hamlet. One home is within 440 metres of the planned pipeline.
Photograph by: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald, Calgary Herald
CALGARY - In another challenge to Petro-Canada’s controversial sour gas proposal in the Eastern Slopes, the tiny Eden Valley Indian reserve is trying to block the development with a bylaw barring sour gas pipelines within 1.5 kilometres of its boundaries.
The unusual strategy stems from health and safety concerns for band members, said Calgary lawyer Douglas Rae.
Speaking on behalf of the Stoney Nakoda Nations, Rae said the chiefs have asked for a draft of the bylaw–which has not yet been voted on or approved by council — because they don’t believe the Eden Valley reserve is being treated the same by Alberta’s energy regulator as would a municipality in similar circumstances.
“Eden Valley has higher population density than, for example, Crowsnest Pass,” Rae said. “You wouldn’t need a bylaw if the Energy Resource Conservation Board rules were applied to the reserve as they are to any other urban centre.”
On land just west of Longview, Petro-Canada plans to build a series of sour gas facilities, including a pipeline located within 300 metres of the reserve boundary and 440 metres from the nearest reserve home.
Houses in the reserve are spaced apart from one another in the same manner as acreages. The board says Eden Valley does not have the population density to be classified as an urban centre –which would force a 1.5-kilometre setback should the Petro-Canada project be approved.
But Stoney Nakoda Nations leaders say they are concerned about the wellbeing of about 500 reserve members, many of whom don’t have phones and could be difficult to notify in the event of a sour gas leak.
Petro-Canada says not only is the proposed project a key part of the company’s plays in the Alberta foothills, it will be safe.
“They question why they’re not recognized as an urban centre. The ERCB hasn’t recognized it as such–and we follow the regulations as they’re set,” said Petro-Canada spokesman Kyle Happy, noting that the bylaw is an issue of public policy that shouldn’t be addressed by an oil and gas company.
“A setback is only one of the components of safety when you’re doing an oil and gas development,” Happy added.
He said details have yet to be determined, but emergency plans will take into account communication issues — and the lack of land lines — specific to the Eden Valley reserve.
“It’s easy to say, ‘We’ll get you cellphones.’ But I think it’s going to be dependent on what would work best for the community,” Happy said.
The draft bylaw states the Stoney Nakoda Nations council could allow an exception to their rule should an application be approved by a majority vote of reserve community members–alongside an accompanying application fee of an unspecified amount.
But Rae said the bylaw is not about striking a deal for more money. “It simply provides the chief and council with flexibility. We’re just trying to be reasonable,” Rae said.
“The relaxation might be allowed if, for example, there were to be other safety measures implemented.”
Rae said his clients have received little to no backing from the federal government — even after making numerous written requests for Ottawa’s intervention–in their quest to get the pipeline placed farther afield.
In Ottawa, Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency spokeswoman Annie Roy said the agency is aware of the proposed Petro-Canada project, but has not been ordered by any government department to complete an environmental assessment. The department of Indian and Northern Affairs declined to comment on the specifics of the bylaw.
University of Calgary law professor Nigel Bankes–who focuses on resource and aboriginal law — said he has never before heard of a reserve council using their power to make bylaws to fight an oil and gas development.
Bankes said besides passing a bylaw–which typically applies only within a reserve’s boundaries and can be vetoed by the Indian Affairs minister –the Stoney Nakoda Nations may argue that their right to self-government, protected by the Constitution, allows them to stop development outside the reserve.
Landowners in the area have long been opposed to Petro-Canada’s Sullivan Field project, which proposes 11 new sour gas wells and two pipelines in Kananaskis Country, 26 kilometres west of the town of Longview. Ranchers say the proposed pipeline route would ruin one of the last remaining bits of near-pristine land in the province.
Meanwhile, the board has wrapped up all public hearings on the project and will make a decision as to whether it will give its approval or not in less than three months.
kcryderman@theherald. canwest.com
By Kelly Cryderman, Calgary HeraldJune 18, 2009Comments (1)
CALGARY - Lingering concerns over a romance between an oil company staffer and an employee at Alberta’s energy industry regulator may once again hold up a contentious hearing on sour gas development in the Eastern Slopes.
At the heart of a new legal challenge from Longview-area ranchers is unanswered questions about whether the “personal relationship” affected the hearing’s proceedings.
Following an investigation, the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB)concluded the couple’s relationship earlier this year did not compromise the ongoing hearing process for the Sullivan Field sour gas project, proposed by Petro-Canada.
But a collection of landowners known as the Big Loop Group has asked for permission to appear before Alberta’s Court of Appeal to appeal the validity of the ERCB’s decision.
Court filings say the board’s examination of the “personal relationship” was flawed on numerous fronts.
“The applicants submit that the ERCB committed a number of errors of law,” said the notice of motion.
Representatives for landowners did not get to participate in the in-camera investigation, while Petro-Canada did, documents say.
It was last February when, in a highly unusual move, the board announced it would suspended the application process based on concerns the relationship influenced the controversial hearing.
An investigation report released the next month said the ERCB employee had a crush on the Petro-Canada employee during the public hearings– which began last November –but only handed over a business card on Jan. 30, the last day of public presentations in High River.
However, the investigation found the two worked in different areas and likely didn’t influence one another.
The identity of the couples has never been revealed. Court documents from the landowners’ group say a public naming is not required, just transcripts of investigation interviews and other documents, with names blacked out.
Big Loop lawyer Stan Carscallen would not comment on the proceedings this week.
But landowners have long been opposed to Petro-Canada’s Sullivan Field project, which proposes 11 new sour gas wells and two pipelines in Kananaskis Country–26 kilometres west of the town of Longview. The ranchers say the proposed pipeline route would ruin one of the last remaining bits of near-pristine land in the province.
However, Petro-Canada says other routes were dismissed due to environmental considerations and the feasibility of construction. The company also said it has given the ERCB a comprehensive environmental assessment.
Last week, the ERCB turned down the landowners’ bid to freeze the hearing process while issues are heard in the Court of Appeal.
Petro-Canada spokesman Kyle Happy said the company’s original position stands. “We believe the board took the appropriate steps to make sure the integrity of the hearing was not compromised,” Happy said.
One of the key issues of the sour gas project hearing is how close the pipeline will be built to the Eden Valley reserve. Petro-Canada wants to build a pipeline within 300 metres of the reserve boundary and 440 metres from the nearest home.
Douglas Rae, the lawyer representing the reserve, questioned the safety setbacks from the pipeline.
Rae’s client is applying as an intervener to the Court of Appeal.
kcryderman@theherald.canwest.com
Province tries to achieve green growth
By Trish Audette, with files from Kelly Cryderman, Calgary Herald, Edmonton JournalApril 28, 2009
The province introduced landmark legislation Monday aimed at harmonizing the duelling wants and needs of economic growth and environmental protection.
Bill 36, the Alberta Land Stewardship Act, tinkers with 26 different laws already in place and puts a framework in place to assign seven regional planning boards across the province. Regional plans should be done by 2012.
“With Bill 36 our province enters a new era of land and resource stewardship, one that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the opportunities of the next generation,” said Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton, who tabled the bill.
It may be a mistake to emphasize the potential power of local advisory councils, however, Green Party Leader Joe Anglin said Monday.
“Whether the minister listens to them or not is strictly up to the minister,” he said.
The proposed Act pays special attention to community, business, landowner and aboriginal stakeholders in maintaining Alberta’s biodiversity. But Anglin warned cabinet members will be able to override everything.
Edmonton-Strathcona NDP MLA Rachel Notley offered a similar caution, noting how the provincial government rules on matters that pit environmental sensibility against business interest will be very important. “At the end of the day, not all of this is going to come together through some magical consensus.”
So far, the province has appointed a regional advisory council in the Lower Athabasca region, which includes Fort McMurray and the majority of northeast Alberta. The South Saskatchewan regional council is next in line, encompassing most of southern Alberta.
Nanton-area rancher Mac Blades said he likes the sound of what the government is pro-posing, but wants details on the tools the government will use to conserve land.
Particularly, Blades would like to see a major expansion of conservation easements, which are agreements to conserve the ecological integrity of a parcel of land. The easement is registered on the land title with restrictions on land use, but landowners retain ownership.
“There’s so much more pressure on the land,”Blades said, adding that more and more farmers and ranchers are interested in this program.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Ranchers fight plan for gas fields in Kananaskis
As a result of its merger with Petro-Canada, Suncor Energy will inherit a nasty brouhaha that has been brewing on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies, the Herald’s Deborah Yedlin writes today.
A group of six ranchers calling itself “the Big Loop Group” is opposing a natural gas pipeline linking two fields in Kananaskis Country, arguing the plan poses a threat to the environment.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology/Petro+Canada+Ranchers/1440852/story.html
In an unprecedented move last month, Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) halted a Petro-Canada project hearing process after an employee disclosed a new personal relationship with an employee of the oil and gas company.
The ERCB employee had a crush on the Petro-Canada employee during at least part of the hearings–which began last November– but only handed over a business card on Jan.30, the last day of public presentations in High River.
The board says based on the results of an external investigation, conducted over the past month, it’s satisfied the relationship will not influence the hearing. The process to determine whether Petro-Canada can drill 11 sour gas wells and construct new pipe-lines near Longview will continue unabated.
“We wanted to be 100 per cent certain the integrity of the process in this case remained intact,” said board spokesman Bob Curran.
“Bringing in a third party ensures in our mind that transparency continues, and also that it’s not a matter of us strictly investigating ourselves.”
However, the investigation has done little to silence critics of the project, or the board.
“This hearing should be null and void,”said Alberta’s Green Party Leader Joe Anglin.
Anglin said the staff involved need to be named so the public and opponents of the project can also judge whether there is any conflict of interest.
“The board is wrong to keep this quiet.”
A letter from the investigator, lawyer Perry Mack, lays out some details about the relationship–even though their identities, and even their sex, are being kept secret based on the ERCB’s privacy rules.
The dating began with a dinner on Feb. 7 — a week after public hearings in High River ended, but before the hearing process was formally over.
“A personal relationship followed,” Mack said.
In interviews with the investigator, the Petro-Canada employee was “emphatic” that a ground rule of the relationship was the two could not discuss matters of substance related to the hearing. Together, the couple watched a TV news program on the hearing, and then “talked a lot about the hearing” — but only in the context of “how they came to be together.”
Mack said he believes the couple.
In his letter, he also said the ERCB employee and the Petro-Canada employee were involved in separate parts of the hearing.
By taking a paid administrative leave, the ERCB employee will have no further involvement on the file, Mack said.
The ERCB added that the employee is not a decision-maker in the process.
Mack conducted his investigation based on interviews with both parties, as well as other ERCB staff members. He also obtainedsomee-mails. Another lawyer, David Jones, then made recommendations.
Neither Petro-Canada or the ERCB will talk about whether the two are still dating.
The ERCB will not give any details of the status of their employee.Petro-Canada says their employee is still working on the Sullivan Field file.
Kyle Happy, a spokesman for Petro-Canada, said the investigation “confirms the integrity of the hearing process.”
But he said the company never had concerns about the relationship in first place.
“We have full confidence in our employee,”Happy said.
Even before news of the relation-ship flared up, the Sullivan Field hearing never lacked controversy.
The Petro-Canada project has been fought by environmentalists and landowners because of the impact they believe it will have on land, water and wildlife. There are also safety concerns. The sour gas pipeline will travel 440 metres away from the nearest home in the Eden Valley reserve.
Robert Shotclose, a Bearspaw administrator originally from Eden Valley, said he is not surprised the investigation found nothing wrong with the relationship.
He said the general perception across Alberta is that the ERCB “always comes down on the side of the industry.”
The band opposes the development, saying the pipeline shouldn’t be routed near houses on the reserve.
Not sense of humour or a beautiful set of pearly whites, but the familiarity of day-to-day contact with another person–no matter how glamorous or mundane the setting–is what brings out cupid’s arrow.
I was reminded of this decidedly unromantic fact upon hearing of the provincial energy regulator’s announcement Thursday that it was suspending an ongoing and contentious energy application due to a “personal” relationship between a Petro-Canada employee and a board employee–the latter who made the bombshell admission 72 hours after Valentine’s Day.
The Energy Resources Conservation Board has been holding public hearings since Nov. 12 on Petro-Canada’s controversial proposal to drill 11 sour gas wells and build a pipeline in the Eastern Slopes west of Longview.
All that has now come to an unprecedented halt. The board employee, of undisclosed gender, has been placed on administrative leave, and a third party brought in to investigate whether the integrity of the hearings has been compromised.
I asked board spokesman Bob Curran just what a “personal” relationship means in the 21st century. Although he acknowledged the vague wording, he wasn’t budging.
“What you have to understand is, because of the privacy act, there is very little we can say about this,” says Curran. “I’m legally prohibited from giving away any details.”
By Friday afternoon, Petro-Canada spokesman Kyle Happy had joined the cryptic conversation, assuring media the investigation “will demonstrate that the process has not been jeopardized in any way.”
Just when I started to think I’d entered a Seinfeld script, things got more entertaining. I called up Andrew Nikiforuk, the one person I know who is familiar with the board and, married with three sons, also with the ways of love.
But whereas I was thinking possible candlelight dinners and walks in the park, Nikiforuk’s mind went straight to the gutter.
“People have been saying for years that the ERCB and the industry are in bed together,” says Nikiforuk, an award-winning author who has followed the industry for years.
“Now we have hard evidence to prove it.”
No fan of the board, Nikiforuk says this latest boondoggle is another example of the hazards of having a provincial energy regulator that receives 58 per cent of its funding from the oil and gas industry.
“Their mandate to be impartial has been compromised once again, but this time it’s in the bedroom, not the boardroom.”
Nikiforuk is nevertheless impressed the staid environs of a hearing would spawn a relationship with enough sparks to shut down the whole show.
“Sex is the last thing you’d think of when you walk into an ERCB hearing,” he says. “I would actually argue that it’s an effective form of birth control.”
According to Joe Anglin, Nikiforuk’s not the only observer having fun with this latest news in an otherwise dry and serious sector.
“The e-mail jokes have been flying back and forth all day,” says Anglin, spokesman for nearly 1,000 Alberta landowners and farmers, who is usually angry, rather than amused, by what goes on at the board.
He shares a couple of the jokes with me. And no, they can’t be printed in this newspaper.
Anglin can be forgiven for having a laugh at the expense of the board. Back in 2007, Alberta’s Energy and Utilities Board, the precursor to the ERCB, hired private investigators who wiretapped Anglin’s home phone during another hearing. Alberta’s privacy commissioner found that the EUB violated two sections of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act by using private eyes to collect information on private citizens.
“They’re no strangers to scandal,” says Anglin, “but this time, we’re the ones having the laugh.”
But this is just a brief interlude, a moment of levity in a world where levity is too often a rare commodity. Soon enough, things will get straight-faced once again the next time Anglin and his fellow landowners square off with the province’s regulator.
Because for these longtime adversaries, proximity has not made the heart grow fonder.
A budding personal relationship has derailed an already contentious hearing into a sour gas project in southern Alberta.
In an unprecedented move, the province’s energy regulator announced Thursday it has suspended an ongoing energy application hearing due to a “personal” relationship between a Petro-Canada representative and an agency employee.
“We’ve never had to take steps of this nature,” said Bob Curran, a spokesman for the Energy Resources Conservation Board.
“We just want to ensure that the integrity of the process hasn’t been compromised in any way.”
The reasons for the delay shocked and infuriated stakeholders in the Longview area.
“My clients and I are simply surprised,” said lawyer Stan Carscallen, who represents a group of ranchers and landowners who are opposed to the drilling.
“We had no inkling any such thing was going on.”
Similarly, the lawyer who represents the Stony Nakoda Nations said his clients were stunned and disappointed, given the time, money and energy that has gone into the month-long process.
“We vigorously object to any semblance of (bias),” Oliver MacLaren said. “This is all a bit of a shock.”
The board has been holding public hearings since Nov. 12 on Petro-Canada’s controversial proposal to drill 11 sour gas wells and build a pipeline in the Eastern Slopes west of Longview.
“This has been an involved process so these shenanigans must have been pretty shady or swarmy to call things to a halt,” said 72-year-old rancher Harvey Gardner, who is opposed to the Sullivan Field project.
Curran would only disclose that the relationship began in this calendar year and that the board employee told panel officials about the relationship this week.
“The panel and other staff were unaware of (the relationship) prior to this point.”
A spokesman for Petro-Canada said the company will co-operate with the probe.
“Obviously this is disappointing news,” Kyle Happy said.
“We respect the ERCB’s decision and their hearing process. We are therefore taking this matter very seriously and will co-operate fully with the ERCB in its investigation.”
The board said it will hire an outside investigator to look into the relationship to make sure that the “integrity” of the process is upheld.
The board took pains to point out the agency employee is not a “decision maker” at the hearing, but both people have been involved in the hearing. The employee has been placed on an administrative leave, pending the results of the investigation.
Curran said in his nine years at the agency this is the only time he can recall a board hearing being suspended due to a personal relationship.
“We want to avoid any perceived conflicts,” he said. “We’re very sensitive about those sorts of things.”
Curran said it is not unheard of to see relationships between board staff members and companies with applications before the board.
“But what we do in those situations is those staff don’t participate in any files that involve any company where there’s a conflict or perceived conflict of interest,” he said.
“For example, if someone here had a spouse who worked at EnCana, then they wouldn’t work on any files that pertain to EnCana.”
Curran said the board hasn’t yet found an outside investigator, but he hopes the process will be completed as quickly as possible.
“This proceeding has taken a long time as it is.”
It remains to be seen whether the investigation into the relationship will lead to a new hearings, or what actions will be taken.
The ERCB panel hearing Petro-Canada’s application will make the final decision on what will be done.
All parties opposing the drilling said they eagerly anticipate the results of the investigation to know whether the process picks up where it left off, or starts over again.
For those who are interested in seeing what was said on W-5 on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 please check out their online synopsis of the show. There are some video clips as well, runtime is about 20 minutes or so. Spread the word, pass it on, and be sure to sign the petition if you get a chance.
The W-FIVE program on the proposed Petro-Canada pipeline and the opposition it is encountering from numerous stakeholders will air on CTV this Saturday, February 7, at 7 pm, MST and ET.
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