Chief Maureen Thomas was skeptical as she walked out of Canada’s main Parliament Building on a brisk but sunny morning in autumn.

It was Nov. 28, 2016, and she had just given Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr four major reports highlighting extensive warnings about Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Thomas, chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation in British Columbia, said the project would harm her territory for generations to come.

“At the end of the day, it comes right down to water, food,” she said in an interview after her meeting. “When you keep depleting the natural resources — the health of them — it’s going to gradually flow out to everything else and that is really dangerous to our community and the surrounding area.”

She said she couldn’t help feeling that the government was just going through the motions — “checking off a box” on the list of legal obligations it needed to fulfill before officially approving the pipeline.

More than a year after the pipeline’s approval — and a major trade blowout between the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta — government insiders say she was right.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity with National Observer, they say a high-ranking public servant instructed them, at least one month before the pipeline was approved, “to give cabinet a legally-sound basis to say ‘yes’” to Trans Mountain. These instructions came at a time when the government claimed it was still consulting in good faith with First Nations and had not yet come to a final decision on the pipeline.

Legal experts interviewed by National Observer say these instructions could be a significant matter reviewed by the courts to determine if the government’s approval of Trans Mountain was valid.

The government would neither confirm, nor deny that public servants were given these instructions to find a way to approve the project. But it described the allegation as “unsubstantiated” information.

It ultimately rejected all four of the reports submitted by Thomas — more than 150 pages in total — in less than a day, and approved the Trans Mountain project a few hours later.