Anti-pipeline activists are staging a “Salish Sea VS. NEB Day of Action” today in downtown Vancouver to mark the start of the new National Energy Board hearings into the Trans Mountain expansion project.

The first event is at 3 p.m. and involves a protest at the National Energy Board Office, 800 Burrard St., with a forum happening at 6 p.m. at the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch on Georgia.

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These new NEB hearings are in response to the recent decision of the Federal Court of Appeal quashing construction permits. The presiding judge found that the original NEB review had wrongly excluded the marine impact of increased tanker traffic and had failed in the constitutional obligation to meaningfully consult impacted Indigenous nations.

“Given the extremely short timetable for the new consultations, the federal government looks like it is again trying to 'get to yes' by doing the absolute minimum which it hopes the courts will accept to allow the expansion to proceed,” said Climate Convergence organizer Thomas Davies in a news release.

Protesters today will be carrying 80 hand-painted placards of local sea creatures that could be harmed by a spill on the Trans Mountain pipeline shipping route.

The event will then move to the library for a presentation by Simon Fraser University climatologist Dr. Kirsten Zickfeld, an author of the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.