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This is not how regulatory decisions are supposed to work

The cancellation of Energy East might have been partly influenced by economics, but it is the ongoing pattern of political interference that has made energy projects less predictable and less affordable in Canada than in stabler environments. In 2016, the Liberals introduced five politically motivated principles to “restore confidence in Canada’s environmental assessment processes.” Most were pure pageantry. The government promised, for instance, to ensure regulatory decisions would be based on science and evidence (as if they somehow weren’t before), and to ensure Aboriginal groups would be consulted (as if this wasn’t already a constitutional obligation).

But one new principle did substantively change things: going forward, the government would assess the “direct and upstream greenhouse gas emissions linked to projects.”This requires regulators to engage in an extraordinary amount of guesswork. It ignores the fact that other countries will supply fossil fuels if we choose not to. And itmakes an already fraught regulatory climate that much more uncertain.



Energy East should not have been subject to criteria not in place when the company filed its application

Energy East filed its application with the NEB before these new rules were in effect, so the project shouldn’t have been subject to the new criteria in the first place. But it was.It leaves one to wonder whether the Liberals intended to orchestrate a cancellation of Energy East to avoid the political fallout of approving or rejecting it later on. This is the same government, after all, that used an oil-tanker traffic ban to undermine the Northern Gateway project (which had previously been approved by the Harper government), to curry political favour in some parts of the country, while hurting others.