Nova Scotia seafood industry representatives are hoping their plea for changes to Bill C-69 didn’t fall on deaf ears when they appeared before the Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources in Halifax on April 24.
The hearing was one of three in Atlantic Canada and nine across the country to study Bill C-69, An Act to Enact the Impact Assessment Act and the Canadian Energy Regulator Act and to amend and rename the Navigation Protection Act.
Under the Impact Assessment Act, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NSOPB) and the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB) are given greater authority when it comes to environmental assessments of offshore petroleum projects and will fill two out of five seats on panels that would be appointed to review offshore projects, without amendment to the Bill.
Currently, the offshore petroleum boards act in an advisory role in the environmental assessment process.
“Although Bill C-69 is intended to return transparency and credibility to Canada’s impact assessment process, it will fail in its present form to achieve that objective in Canada’s oceans,” said Colin Sproul, president of the Bay of Fundy Fishermen’s Association in his testimony before the committee. “Provisions within the bill to shift authority for offshore impact assessments to offshore regulators must be removed if this legislation is to be supported by fishers and coastal communities.”
Both Sproul and Nathan Blades, one of the directors for the Clean Action Ocean Committee (COAC) told senators the offshore boards “are already placed in a conflict of interest through their dual roles as regulator and proponent of an industry. They are composed entirely of industry insiders who, while holding the expertise necessary to promote offshore development do not have the capacity to assess all impacts from their actions. This holds especially true for socio-economic impacts and impacts to existing industries like fishing where the boards hold no knowledge.”
Blades said COAC has spent more than three years asking the C-NSOPB and both provincial and federal governments to enact stronger offshore oil and gas regulations for the protection of the seafood industry, including:
- declaring important fishing grounds and sensitive nursery areas off-limits to oil and gas;
- requiring a capping stack to be located on the Eastern Seaboard, ready to deploy within 24 hours of a blow-out;
- a commitment to not use toxic chemical dispersants on potential oil spills;
- a requirement to improve spill response methods and technology;
- a requirement that spilled oil be physically removed from the ocean;
- and establishing an insurance fund to compensate the seafood industry should it be wiped out due to an oil and gas disaster.
“These requests for stronger protection have been dismissed by the C-NSOPB who claim existing regulations are strong enough, the oil and gas industry is very safe, and the possibility of a disaster occurring is microscopic,” said Blades.
With the seafood industry contributing 25,000 direct jobs to the Nova Scotia economy and an export value alone estimated at $2 billion, “my worry is if someday down the road there should be an oil or gas disaster in the offshore, we’ll be done,” said Blades.
“It would be a major, major, massive blow to the economy of Nova Scotia. Every coastal community in Nova Scotia depends on the fishery,” he said adding such a scenario “would not only wipe out the livelihoods of people and the economy of rural communities, it would also wipe out a food source for the planet. The majority of Nova Scotia seafood is exported.”
Blades said there’s good reason to worry considering there have been three accidents in the offshore in the last three years including the Stena IceMax dropping a 115-tonne lower marine riser package plus 2,000 metres of drill pipe to the ocean floor just meters from a wellhead off Nova Scotia in 2016, a reported leakage of 136,000 litres of synthetic drilling fluid in June 2018 off Nova Scotia by the West Aquarius drilling platform and the Husky Energy spill off Newfoundland in Nov. 2018 while trying to restart operations in extreme sea states following a massive storm.
“Existing regulations did not require Husky to obtain permission from the C-NLOPB to restart operations and the C-NLOPB reported that Husky followed established protocols,” said Blades.
“Clearly the current regulatory regime is not sufficient to protect the marine environment in the extreme conditions of the North Atlantic. We are at risk and our pleas for better regulation are ignored.”
