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How much time does the Burnaby RCMP spend policing Kinder Morgan properties?

It’s a question politicians are asking again after RCMP records obtained by the Georgia Straight shed some light on how many calls the force receives in relation to the pipeline company.

“There are a whole lot of calls in 2014 and 2015, more so than other years,” said Burnaby city councillor Sav Dhaliwal. “I think that is a result of activity relating to the expansion project. That has brought Kinder Morgan into the public arena.”

Dhaliwal was referring to the company’s plans to twin an existing pipeline that carries heavy crude oil from Alberta to a port in Burnaby. Last November, the RMCP arrested dozens of people when they refused to leave a protest on Burnaby Mountain that aimed to disrupt survey work Kinger Morgan was conducting in the area.

Those sorts of heightened tensions around environmental concerns are driving the increased volume in calls, Dhaliwal suggested.

“The last couple of years, the activity just suddenly picked up,” he continued. “I think Kinder Morgan bears the responsibility for any additional activity for the RCMP on the financial side of it.”

RCMP data supplied in response to a freedom of information request provides basic details for 53 calls the force received in relation to Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby Mountain facilities and the company’s Westridge Marine Terminal from 2010 to March 2015. However, the record is not complete and the actual number of calls the RCMP received could be much higher.

The RCMP withheld information on an unknown number of calls citing sections of the Access to Information Act. Those pertain to disclosures of information obtained or prepared in the investigation of a crime or enforcement of the law.

In a brief telephone interview, Burnaby RCMP Cpl. Daniela Panesar declined to discuss specifics. The spokesperson for the force clarified that the list displays calls to police and does not state whether any call resulted in an officer or officers being dispatched. Panesar also declined to provide any context or opinion indicating whether the volume of calls to Kinder Morgan facilities was in any way atypical.

Footage of Kinder Morgan's Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby landed Vancouver filmmaker David Lavallee in trouble with an RCMP national security investigator. David Lavallee

Documentary filmmaker David Lavallee has a rough idea how much time went into each of those 53 calls.

In a telephone interview, he recounted one afternoon last November when he recorded video of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Marine Terminal using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Lavallee is producing a film about unconventional energy reserves and that terminal is a key transit point for bitumen mined in Alberta.

Two days after filming, Lavallee told the Straight he received a voicemail message from the RCMP. Two weeks after that, two community RCMP officers knocked on his door and left a business card while he was out.

In a subsequent telephone call with a third officer, RCMP national security investigator Gregory Haasdyk, Lavallee asked how authorities came to know of his interests in energy infrastructure.

“He [Haasdyk] said, ‘We got a call, a complaint, from Kinder Morgan, who had called in your [licence] plate,” Lavallee said.

In a recording of that conversation, Haasdyk maintains a friendly tone and answers Lavallee's questions.

“Kinder Morgan does make a lot of complaints,” Haasdyk says. “And if we don’t know who they are complaining against then, yes, we do have to go and find that out.”

After reviewing the RCMP record obtained by the Straight, Lavallee noted he could not find his own encounters with the RCMP listed there. Another incident missing from the document is a March 6 call the RCMP received about an SFU professor named Tim Takaro. On that date, Takaro caught the attention of a Kinder Morgan security guard by taking a photograph of the Burnaby Mountain property. Five days later, he too received a call from the RCMP.

Lavallee said those two missing dates make him suspect the actual number of calls the RCMP fields in relation to Kinder Morgan is much higher than 53.

“Certainly, in my case, it was an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars,” he added.

Included in a long list of calls to Burnaby RCMP related to Kinder Morgan properties is a August 2011 incident involving cocaine possession.

In a telephone interview, Kinder Morgan spokesperson Ali Hounsell said any call the company makes to the RCMP is a matter of public safety.

“When our security folks do report something, it is because there is something suspicious,” she emphasized.

Hounsell noted Kinder Morgan’s private guards will engage a person before calling police. She cited a recent encounter with a CBC National News crew where guards asked journalist Chris Brown why the group was filming adjacent to company property.

“Those are normal conversations that happen, I would say quite regularly,” Hounsell said. “It’s just when it’s something unusual that it does get reported to police.”

Meanwhile, a number of other RCMP documents have come to light in recent years that use dramatic language to describe environmentalists and First Nations people.

“There is a high probability that we could see flash mobs, round dances and blockades become much less compliant to laws,” reads an RCMP document dated December 2012. “The escalation of violence is ever near.”

A 2014 RCMP intelligence assessment similarly warns that in British Columbia, “there is a coalition of like-minded violent extremists who are planning criminal actions to prevent the construction of the pipeline.”

A January 2014 report produced by the RCMP’s Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team includes a reference to a January 2014 edition of the Georgia Straight. The RCMP's report cites the accompanying article as evidence environmental activists intend to damage infrastructure while avoiding hurting any people in the process.

B.C.’s lone Green party MLA, Andrew Weaver, described the sort of government surveillance revealed in those documents as "carried away".

On the RCMP call list obtained by the Straight, he asked the same questions posed by Dhaliwal.

“I don’t want to second guess it [the RCMP] but it does seem like a lot,” Weaver said. “It really begs the question: why? Why were the RCMP being called so many times? What for? What could possibly warrant it?”

He also asked if citizens were getting in trouble for simply wandering to close too a fence, and warned that could constitute an infringement on their civil liberties.

Weaver revealed such an incident happened to him, though under different circumstances. He recounted travelling Europe for a summer with a friend named Tony.

“Tony saw this amazing power plant, which was so archaic that he wanted to take a picture of it,” Weaver recounted. “So he took out his camera to take a picture. And security guards came running up with sub-machine guns.”

“But this was in East Germany,” Weaver said with a laugh. “I would have loved for it to have been 1984 but it was 1982. So this is the direction we are heading.”