Lelu Island : LNG Divide and Conquer Politics

A community torn apart by LNG and pipeline politics. 

A mayor who sent a letter to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency confirming opposition to the PacificNorthWest LNG plant on Lelu Island in accordance with a community vote. He then sent another letter eight days later retracting the first letter and replacing it with one of conditional support.

The mayor and his brother are VP and CEO of Eagle Spirit Energy FN pipeline company backed by Aquilini Group, donors of $1.2 million to the BC Liberal Party. 
Aquilini has pledged financing to Eagle Spirit on condition of securing First Nations consent to a pipeline route to nearby Grassy Point, future LNG site.
On June 3 2016 Christy Clark announced an FN vote supporting the LNG project.

Discourse Media : Divide and Conquer June 2016

Last year, members of the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation, whose traditional territory includes Lelu Island, overwhelmingly rejected the proposed development on the island — and almost $1.2 billion in promised benefits.

A 2014 report by PNW LNG suggests initial contact with Lax Kw’alaams occurred in December 2012. But at least six months prior, Petronas had already earmarked Lelu Island for its plant and signed a feasibility agreement with the Prince Rupert Port Authority. 

Despite this mounting pressure, elected and hereditary leaders remained relatively united in their opposition to LNG development on Lelu Island — until a new mayor and council were elected in November 2015.

At first, the newly elected leaders maintained the community’s position. Mayor John Helin even submitted a letter to the CEAA reiterating the band’s rejection of the benefit deal on March 7, 2016.

But eight days later, in a move that hereditary leaders call a betrayal, Helin submitted a second letter to the CEAA that contradicted his earlier letter and offered conditional support for a project. The letter was dated March 15, when several elected councillors were away on an annual kelp-gathering trip on Digby Island.

Community members in Lax Kw’alaams were shocked. According to Smith, “the last time we had a band meeting was in a previous administration,” before Helin’s November election.

The Letter:

Ottawa Citizen : Lax Kw’alaams band council offers conditional support for Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal March 2016

The Lax Kw’alaams letter of March 15, incorrectly dated 2015, was filed with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency four days after the March 11 deadline for comments on a draft report on the terminal that found the project would increase greenhouse gases significantly and harm porpoise, but not harm salmon.

The letter, signed by elected mayor John Helin, retracts an initial letter to CEAA dated March 7, in which Helin had said the Lax Kw’alaams “continue to oppose the project in its current form,” in particular locating a liquefied natural gas facility on Lelu Island adjacent to Flora Bank over concerns of harm it could cause to fish habitat

The new letter replaces a lengthy series of concerns, questions and recommendations in the first letter with two “legally-binding” provisions that Helin said will be needed to gain support of the Lax Kw’alaams for the project.

The Canadian Environment Assessment Agency also removed the March 7 letter from their documents website.

Mayor John Helin is vice president and his brother Calvin is president of Eagle Spirit Energy Holdings, founded in 2012 to establish a First Nations Energy Corridor across northern British Columbia. 

Macleans : A pipeline of their own May 2014

Luigi Aquilini, the billionaire patriarch of the Aquilini Investment Group ... was in attendance at the launch event in Vancouver, and said his company would arrange funding for the project if Eagle Spirit is able to secure buy-in from First Nations along the route.

The Aquilini Group has donated $1.2 million to the BC Liberals

Canada’s Most Powerful Business People 2016: #39 — Calvin Helin  Nov 2015

Calvin Helin’s Eagle Spirit Energy confirmed that it has something rival oil pipeline projects do not: consent from all the First Nations chiefs along the route of an energy corridor from Alberta to the Pacific Coast. 

Buzzfeed : In Spite Of What B.C.’s Premier Says, There’s No Evidence This First Nation Voted In Favour Of A Major Pipeline June 24 2016

At a June 3 press conference, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark said a major hurdle had been cleared for the proposed $36 billion Pacific NorthWest liquefied natural gas pipeline and plant.

“The Lax Kw’alaams voted massively in favour of supporting LNG, with some conditions,” Clark said.

However, an investigation by Discourse Media, which sent two reporters to Lax Kw’alaams, suggests that no vote in favour of the project ever occurred.

The Tyee, June 24 2016

But it is the federal government that now holds the pen on whether or not to let Petronas, the state-owed Malaysian oil company that is the key investor in PNW LNG, build its project on Lelu Island. If the Discourse Media investigation isn't proof negative of the corrosive, divisive, opaque and utterly bankrupt nature of how resource development gets done in Canada's so-called Reconciliation age, I don't know what else is.

Yet on Monday, when six federal cabinet ministers announced a wholesale review of the rules for approving major resource projects, they stuck to the Trudeau government's line that pipeline proposals already in process when the Liberals were elected will not be sent back to the drawing board, but will be reviewed according to the rules set by the Harper regime. 

This is a confounding decision, because part of the reason Trudeau & Co got elected in the first place is because Harper's major project review process was -- and remains -- rotten to the core.

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Chris Alexander, Minister of IMPs and ICTs

When Jason Kenney grandly announced his new temporary foreign worker program reforms last week - Putting Canadians First! - he slyly handed off the greater part of his troubles to Chris Alexander - Minister of Gollumization, Citizenship, and Immigration - and now also Minister of IMPs and ICTs.  

We don't hear much about IMPs (outside of childrens' books) - the International Mobility Program under which the majority of workers enter Canada. They do not have to pass a labour market test (LMIA) to determine whether they will be putting Canadians out of work because, as our new MinIMP explained, the program is intended to benefit not individual businesses by filling specific jobs, but rather "Canada as a whole".

Via Kenney's ministry, Employment and Social Development Canada :

Of the 221,273 foreign nationals who entered Canada in 2013, 38% came in under the TFWP, but 62% came in under the IMP - 83,740 vs 137,533

Then there's the ICTs - Intra-Company Transfers - also not reliant on LMIAs to safeguard Canadian jobs because they were created to allow multinational corps to move their skilled workers easily from country to country.

You may recall this whole TFW fiasco first blew up in the public eye because the Royal Bank farmed out part of its IT work to iGATE, a company that straddles US, Canada and India, who then cycled its workers in and out of Canada for training by RBC staffers they would later replace under an intra-company transfer. 
As RBC CEO Gord Nixon explained at the time, only one of them came into Canada as a TFW, and besides, RBC "does not get involved in the hiring practices of the companies it hires."

In BC, eight US construction workers were granted entry to BC by the CBSA under an ICT after a US company got the contract to build a wood-waste storage building near Prince George. These "specialized workers" included a former rancher and an apprentice roofer and produce clerk. Yea NAFTA! and all that, but don't we have enough ranchers, apprentice roofers, and produce clerks looking for any kind of work in Canada already?

Asked about the union-backed court case protesting import of the eight US workers, Kenney referred reporters to Chris Alexander, but a year ago he stated : "The obligations we have have for intra-company transfers are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

G&M, May 17, 2014 :

"The final text of the much-vaunted Canada-European Union free trade agreement (CETA) is expected to include a list of occupations that can be fast-tracked into Canada and would allow European firms to bring European workers into Canada through inter-company transfers ...  

The Conservative government has described the deal’s provisions for temporary entry of labour as “the most ambitious ever in a free trade agreement.”

Still you can't please everyone.

B.C.’s deputy premier and natural gas development minister Rich Coleman is worried Canada is going to "fail" if companies cannot hire temporary foreign workers for the 100,000 jobs needed to develop LNG export projects on the coast.

The Kitimat LNG project is co-owned by Canadian branches of U.S. energy giants Chevron Corp. and Apache Corp. Will they be bringing in their own workers?
TransCanada, once billed in the US as "an American company with operations in Canada", is slated to build a $1.9-billion pipeline link for Kitimat LNG project. 

In February Mr. Coleman announced there was "no question the industry will be looking to foreign workers to get up and running", and in March he touted the importance of being on 

"a continent with a lot more people south to us ... so we have access to other skilled labour on the continent and there are people who are very good at doing certain jobs - specialized welders." 

One presumes he isn't referring to the TransCanada welders on the southern leg of the Keystone XL Canada to Texas project : 

"Over 72 per cent of welds required repairs during one week. In another week, TransCanada stopped welding work after 205 of 425 welds required repair.

Inspections by the safety agency found TransCanada wasn’t using approved welding procedures to connect pipes, the letter said. The company had hired welders who weren’t qualified to work on the project because TransCanada used improper procedures to test them."

So. PM-hopeful Jason Kenney's TFW Program "will now refer to only those streams under which foreign workers enter Canada at the request of employers following approval through a new Labour Market Impact Assessment." 
For everything else - the difficult politically damaging bits - there's the guy wearing the IMP ears.
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DILBIT : "Every plant and tree died"

9.5 million litres of industrial waste water, the 10th largest spill of its kind in Alberta in nearly 40 years.

Houston-based Apache Corp, with a project based on Haisla reserve lands in the Douglas Channel, also wants to export LNG from the eastern Rockies to China via an expansion of its Pacific Trail Pipeline.
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Kinder Morgan would like to dredge the Second Narrows

so that Suezmax oil tankers carrying four times as much crude as spilled from the Exxon Valdez will be able to access the Vancouver Harbour Westport tanker terminal on the southeastern shore of Burrard Inlet.

"Metro Vancouver supportive of expansion" reads the Kinder Morgan power point slide.

Note the word "rearguard" on the map.
Apparently the Northern Gateway Enbridge pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat is just taking too darn long so why not get started on shipping tar sludge to China via Vancouver Harbour first and then reroute to Kitimat later "as needed".

The Tyee has the story.
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