The reset button needs to be pushed on the Energy East pipeline project review process according to the Conservation Council of New Brunswick’s Fundy Baykeeper.
A new panel has been named by the National Energy Board after the original panel stepped down over conflict of interest concerns, but it remains to be seen how things are going to move ahead from this point on.
Matt Abbott says the process needs to go right back to the point of TransCanada refiling their application and then things can move ahead from there. He points out that the original three member panel made a large number of decisions after the so-called Charest Affair.
“There’s a new panel, they were involved in any of the decisions the last panel made. So we don’t know if they’d make the same decisions, says Abbott. “We now have a new panel that for now…it doesn’t have those biased questions.”
Abbott tells us all the decisions of the last panel are tained by this concern of bias.
“If they stepped down around this question of potential for bias, and if that’s the case then we need to certainly go back to before they behaved in the inappropriate manner,” says Abbott. “And for the process to be credible, it really needs to restart.”
The panel hearings for the Energy East pipeline project were held in Saint John and Fredericton but halted once they moved to Montreal. It was after that the three-member panel recused itself following calls for them to do so after reportedly having a meeting with former Quebec premier Jean Charest who was then a consultant for TransCanada.
The new panel is being led by Don Ferguson, who served for more than a decade in the provincial government as deputy minister of various portfolios including Health, Family and Community Services and Training and Employment development.
