Trans Mountain spokesperson Ali Hounsel told The Globe and Mail hearings such as the one in Spruce Grove are all part of the process.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
The night before Jim Robinson’s hearing before the Canada Energy Regulator, he and Trans Mountain Corp. officials sat in a hotel room negotiating a compensation deal over the proposed pipeline expansion route.
Mr. Robinson first lodged a complaint in 2012, arguing the pipeline expansion would hinder future development of his land and affect the shop in which he stores his contracting equipment in Niton Junction, Alta., about 150 kilometres west of Edmonton.
Just one hour before his hearing was to begin Tuesday morning in Spruce Grove, a small community 20 kilometres west of Edmonton – the first hearing since regulatory processes resumed in July and the CER replaced the National Energy Board – Mr. Robinson struck a confidential deal with the federal Crown corporation building the pipeline.
Surrounded by Trans Mountain lawyers and witnesses, Mr. Robinson’s representative Alex Ramsay said he and his client were withdrawing their complaint. With no arguments to hear, the CER commission’s job was done.
It all took about six minutes.
The commission will travel throughout Alberta and B.C. over the coming months. It will hear from landowners such as Mr. Robinson who have filed complaints over the project route that were unresolved in the first consultation period, or who have seen a change in circumstance on their land or with the pipeline’s construction method or timing.
Trans Mountain spokesperson Ali Hounsel told The Globe and Mail hearings such as the one in Spruce Grove are all part of the process.
She didn’t comment about what the company expects when the commission ventures west of the Rocky Mountains, but said a higher volume of complaints is likely once when they hit the Fraser Valley region in B.C.
Mr. Ramsay is representing another client as the commission heads west – the Redwoods golf club in Langley, B.C. – and he expects the CER to be “sensitive to the public interest” in the hearings.
Ms. Hounsel said Trans Mountain has already reached agreements with the majority of landowners, though Mr. Robinson was critical of how long it took the company to come to the table.
“They should have been on it a lot sooner. The time frame was horrendous,” he said Tuesday.
No matter what the CER commission hears over the coming months, it can’t reverse approval of the project, which was given a green light by the federal government in June. It will simply wrestle with the minutiae of the route details.
The Trans Mountain expansion project will nearly triple the capacity of the existing pipeline to 890,000 barrels a day. Ottawa paid Kinder Morgan Canada $4.5-billion for the project in 2018 to try to get the expansion built. The transaction followed months of continual legal wrangling and challenges.
Work on the 1,147-kilometre expansion has already begun.
At the Edmonton terminal, temporary infrastructure and access routes are under construction, and four new storage tanks and pumps are set for installation soon. Horizontal drilling under the North Saskatchewan River could begin this month, and beneath various roads and creeks in Edmonton in February, depending on approvals. Just beyond city limits, a stockpile site is being prepared at Enoch Cree First Nation, and construction of offices and yards is underway in Acheson.
In the shadow of the Rockies, work is underway on a right-of-way and pumps at Hinton. In the mountains, near Jasper, crews are preparing site-access points along the route. Pending approvals, they’ll soon begin digging trenches along the line to remove and replace pipe.
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Emma Graney