‘Unprecedented’ top Fisheries job puts focus on Northern Gateway
OTTAWA — Enbridge Inc.’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project is getting special attention from the federal Fisheries department, according to an internal email obtained by The Vancouver Sun.
In what critics call an unprecedented step, the department has listed a “Northern Gateway Liaison” at a top level of its organizational chart, under a reorganization prompted by the 2012 budget’s sweeping Fisheries Act amendments.
The position will report directly to the executive director of the National Ecosystems Management Branch at the department’s headquarters.
“This suggests an unprecedented level of access and engagement for a specific project,” said Green party leader Elizabeth May, who in the 1980s was a senior adviser to a federal environment minister. “This is the reality of a government that has told the bureaucracy, ‘be prepared to make sure this project goes through.’”
B.C. NDP MP Fin Donnelly, his party’s deputy fisheries critic, said he’s never heard of a company getting such special treatment. “This clearly exposes the Harper Conservative oil pipeline agenda. They are putting the oil industry ahead of fishing, tourism and all other industries.”
But the press secretary for acting Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said the organizational chart included in the email, sent in late October to employees, and signed by deputy minister Claire Dansereau, “mischaracterized” the position.
The Northern Gateway liaison won’t deal exclusively with the Enbridge project, said Erin Filliter. “In fact, it will involve liaison on several other complex issues,” she said in an email.
Enbridge spokesman Todd Nogier said the company is unaware of a special liaison position for its proposed $6.5-billion project, designed to carry oilsands bitumen from Alberta to the port of Kitimat for tanker shipment to Asia.
The department reorganization goes into effect on Jan, 2, according to the email, leaked to The Sun. The reorganization coincides with big cuts the department’s team of fisheries biologists and support staff, which is responsible for analyzing potential threats to fish and their habitat.
The B.C. branch of the Fisheries Protection Program will lose a third of its staff, dropping to 60 people, and operations will be mostly consolidated in Vancouver, Nanaimo, Kamloops.
That means the closure of several offices, including those in Prince George, Williams Lake and Smithers that are close to controversial projects, including Northern Gateway and the New Prosperity gold and copper mine.
“Never in the past 50-year history of habitat protection have we seen such great cuts in staff in the face of upcoming massive industrial development that can and will harm habitat and our fisheries of the future,” said former federal Fisheries biologist Otto Langer.
The reorganization, say critics, flies in the face of the recommendations made in the recent $26-million report on salmon by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Cohen.
Among Cohen’s recommendations was a call for the government to fully implement the 1986 habitat policy that required government to take action against any “harmful alteration, disruption or destruction” of the habitat of wild fish.
The 2012 budget killed those protections, and replaced them with a much narrower prohibition against activities that result in “the death of fish or any permanent alteration to, or destruction of,” habitat, but only habitat key to designated commercial, recreational or aboriginal fisheries.
Cohen’s report stressed the importance of habitat protection to stem the decline of Fraser River sockeye and expressed “concern” at the government’s plan to slash habitat protection staff.
Opposition MPs have hammered at the Harper government all week, accusing Ottawa of ignoring Cohen’s pleas to step up rather than scale back habitat protection.
“When will the government reverse its devastating changes?” Joyce Murray, Liberal MP for Vancouver Quadra, said during question period. “Is the government waiting for the same devastation of salmon stocks it presided over with the (Atlantic coast) cod?”
Shea responded that the government will “carefully review” the “very expansive” Cohen report that has “serious implications” for B.C. salmon.
“We are going to … ensure that the salmon fishery in British Columbia is sustainable and prosperous for years to come.”
Critics say naming a special liaison for Northern Gateway contradicts the government’s insistence that Fisheries Act amendments were aimed at getting fisheries bureaucrats out of the hair of farmers and municipalities and were not aimed at eliminating regulatory hurdles standing in the way of the Northern Gateway project.
May said the email adds weight to the recent release of an internal document saying the pipeline was “top of mind” as the government contemplated environmental regulatory changes in the 2012 budget.