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McLaren’s research, funded first by the Lax Kw’Alaams First Nation and later by the Gitanyow First Nation, was the beginning of a battle that would see him butting heads with federal bureaucrats, a Malaysian state-owned oil and gas giant and the “dynamic modelling” industry, considered the gold standard for predicting highly complex processes and interactions.

The federal Liberal government conditionally approved the Petronas-led LNG project last month, based in part on an environmental assessment that determined a terminal and suspension bridge across one side of Flora Bank off Lelu Island would not harm fish stocks. Dynamic modelling was integral to the company’s case.

Late last month, First Nations and environmental groups filed several legal challenges against the project, including one based on a claim that the environmental assessment was flawed.

McLaren’s work will be extensively referenced in the court challenge.

He currently has a contract to advise the Gitanyow band, who hired McLaren to do follow-up current measurements on the Flora Bank after his initial findings were challenged. The Skeena Wild Conservation Trust, which has asked the Federal Court for a judicial review of the project’s environment assessment approval, is subsidizing McLaren’s contract with the Gitanyow.

McLaren alleges that Petronas contractors altered, manipulated and ignored data — under the gaze of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, Fisheries and Oceans, and Environment Canada — in an effort to prove their project wouldn’t harm the Flora Bank, a natural formation their model still can’t account for.