Government gives OK, but companies must actually build pipelines: minister
OTTAWA — Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr defended on Tuesday his government’s ability to get major resource projects moving, saying the government has approved a number of proposals and it’s up to their proponents to get them built.
Carr was speaking at the end of a meeting of federal and provincial energy ministers in New Brunswick, where TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline project was an unofficial topic of discussion.
It has been almost a year since the first round of National Energy Board hearings on Energy East collapsed after protesters shut down Montreal hearings and accused the panellists of bias in favour of the oil industry.
In January the board started the whole review process from scratch and appointed a new, three-member panel to conduct the hearings. New hearings haven’t yet been scheduled as the NEB is still designing how the new hearing process will work.