B.C. Environment Minister Terry Lake said the pathway to yes still exists for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, but it's a narrow one.
In Friday's final written argument, the province declared the project in its current form isn't up to its standards and the draft conditions set out by the National Energy Board (NEB) aren't sufficient. Lake said the door is still open for the province to give its blessing if the Joint Review Panel adopts some of his government's recommendations.
"I would say there's a slim possibility of that happening," he said in a phone interview on Monday.
"It's difficult to know what the NEB would do with that information [in the province's final argument] and how they would translate that into conditions."
Last summer, the provincial government unveiled five conditions it said must be met before the it would consider giving the green light to the proposal to connect Alberta's oilsands and Kitimat with a $6.5 billion pipeline and terminal. Although the final say rests with the federal government, the province has threatened to use the permitting process to tie up the project in red tape if the upper level of government tries to push it through against B.C.'s wishes.
In April, the NEB released a list of 199 possible conditions it could place on the project if it was approved, but Lake said they don't go far enough.
"We looked at those draft conditions, cross-referenced them against our concerns and concluded that it still came up short," he said.
In its final argument, the province proposed 21 new conditions it would like to see placed on the project, ranging from a strategy for recovering sunken oil in a marine environment to a guarantee that the pipeline will be automatically shutdown within 10 minutes of an anomalous reading at the control centre. In the latter case, Northern Gateway has said that is now their policy, but the province wants that policy to become a regulation.
How the NEB handles the province's suggestions will play a big role on where the province stands at the end of the process.
"We'll have to see what they end up with at the end of the year and then look at it and see if there's outstanding concerns," Lake said. "There is some possibility they could address those concerns through conditions attached to an approval."
Premier Christy Clark said in the lead up to last month's election campaign that although Northern Gateway had not inched any closer to fulfilling her government's conditions, she didn't want to rule out any project.
"What I've tried to do is set out a path to get to yes with projects rather than just saying no off the top," Clark told the Citizen in an exclusive interview prior to the election campaign. "Nobody would be working in British Columbia if we said no to everything."
That pathway is still there, Lake said, but he doesn't think it's likely all of the province's concerns can be addressed by the end of the year when the Joint Review Panel will make its recommendations to the federal cabinet.
"In my personal view it seems to be a very narrow path because some of things we've talked about are having more research and understanding of how heavy oil acts in a cold, marine environment - would that research be finished by the end of the year? It seems unlikely to me," he said. "I would say that in my view it would be a very, very slim pathway to yes."
The province will give its last word to the NEB later this month at oral arguments in Terrace. Lake said the lawyers representing the government will likely be sticking pretty close to the statements contained in the final argument.
"I think we'll see an reiteration of the concerns we've outlined in our written submission and I don't expect to see any deviation from that," he said.
