This text is taken from the Courrier de la Planète of July 12, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
Could citizen pressure be able to make Ottawa back down on the Bay du Nord project? wonders Hélène Létourneau.
Approval for the Bay du Nord Petroleum Project is final and cannot be revoked by the federal government unless the company breaches any of the conditions imposed on it. Environmental groups, however, believe that popular pressure could still push back the promoter.
Even if it wished, the Trudeau government would not have the right to return to its analysis of the file to arrive at a different result, specifies Anne-Sophie Doré, lawyer at the Quebec Center for Environmental Law. Only the company targeted by this project has recourse to challenge the decision made against it.
“In this case, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act [de 2012] does not provide for mechanisms so that the government can modify a decision made,” explains Me Doré.
Shortly after its project was approved, developer Equinor raised its oil extraction ambitions off Newfoundland, increasing the scale of the project from 300 million to “more than 500 million barrels”. “.
Despite everything, its green light received by Ottawa remains unchanged, since the federal environmental assessment, carried out under the old version of the federal law, was not carried out taking into account the quantity of oil extracted. It even provided for the possibility of expansion.
“To account for the possibility of the proponent finding additional petroleum reserves, the federal environmental assessment considered the potential effects of development beyond the boundaries of the core development area,” explains Impact Assessment Agency of Canada spokesperson Jaclyn Sauvé.
The federal agency ruled in April that Bay du Nord “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects”.
It laid down a series of 137 legally binding conditions for Equinor, such as the production of annual reports, the protection of fish and migratory bird habitats and the obligation not to harm fishermen. The company further pledged that its offshore oil extraction facilities would become carbon neutral by 2050.
Non-compliance with one of the conditions mentioned by the federal government would give the government the right to withdraw its authorization. Such a violation could theoretically be revealed by a report or another of the monitoring mechanisms provided.
Possible mobilization
However, government approval is not always a guarantee of the realization of a project, and the company Equinor is well placed to know it. Another of its deep sea drilling projects fell through in Australia after the mobilization of its opponents.
Despite its approval by the government, the “Great Australian Bight” project [«La grande baie australienne »] was abandoned in February 2020 after exploratory drilling, officially because it was not “commercially competitive”, according to Equinor’s head of Australia, Jone Stangeland.
The Quebec environmental group Équiterre sees great similarities between the abandoned Australian project and the one planned off the Canadian coast, explains its director of government relations, Marc-André Viau.
“In this case, even after the Australian government’s environmental approval of the project, it was the project developer itself who backed down in the face of outcry from local people, environmental groups and Indigenous Peoples. This mobilization success is possible here too. We saw it in particular with Energy East and GNL Quebec, ”he wrote in an email.
Équiterre assures that it is also possible to thwart Bay du Nord’s federal approval through legal means. The organization joined the Sierra Club Canada Foundation in asserting before the Federal Court that the decision in favor of the project violates Canada’s international climate obligations. The date of the hearings is not yet known.
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