The federal government seems set on further gutting theCanadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA), and is expected to introduce “sweeping” regulatory changes to CEAA and related legislation in the House of Commons in the coming weeks. These changes could affect upcoming proposals for pipelines, tar sands projects, mines, small and large energy generation, and much more. It is possiblethe government could also use this opportunity to affect the process for projects currently in the environmental review process, like the Enbridge oil pipeline and supertanker, New Prosperity, or Site C Clean Energy Project proposals.

On January 13th, our Executive Director, Jessica Clogg, appeared on the Bill Good Show on CKNW radio, opposite blogger Vivian Krause, to defend West Coast against the recent American-style attack ads launched against us by the oil industry advocacy group, Ethical Oil.  Even though  Ms. Krause has distanced herself from the ads, the Ethical Oil campaign, in our view, vividly illustrates at least three sources of bias and misinformation in her work:

• Krause’s so-called  “fair” questions are asked only of non-profit  environmental groups  - in this case the groups opposed to Enbridge (but not those who support it);
• Krause, and Ethical Oil, mischaracterize the relationship between funders and fundees;  
• Krause, and Ethical Oil, without any evidence, imply that U.S. charitable foundations are not advancing their charitable objectives (as required by charities law), but are instead advancing undisclosed national or corporate U.S. interests.

What began as a smear campaign against West Coast Environmental Law and other environmental groups has crossed a line with oil industry advocates EthicalOil.org and Ezra Levant (author of the book Ethical Oil) taking aim at the thousands of ordinary Canadians who have registered to express their concerns about the proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines - attacking them as "foreigners".  The truth is that somewhere in the neighbourhood of 99% – of the registrants are Canadians – with a large proportion from northern cities and towns of British Columbia – from the very communities most directly affected by the proposed pipelines and tanker traffic.  We hope that the about  4,500 Canadians and (a handful of) non-Canadians will not allow themselves to be intimidated by Ethical Oil’s misinformation campaign.

BC has laws governing mining roads, other laws governing forestry roads and still other laws governing oil and gas roads.  And historically there’s been no real coordination between the companies building these different roads.  As a result, BC has an estimated 400,000 to 550,000 kilometres of unpaved resource roads (the government itself doesn’t know how many, and where they’re all located).  Last week West Coast Environmental Law submitted our comments on BC’s proposed Natural Resource Roads Act – a piece of legislation intended to better coordinate, and standardize the rules for, the building and maintenance of resource roads.