While much of the country’s attention was focused on the rapidly escalating stand-off between Alberta and British Columbia over the Trans Mountain pipeline this week, another major environmental announcement went largely unnoticed.
On Thursday, the federal government quietly approved BP Canada’s plan to drill up to seven deep exploration wells off the coast of Nova Scotia between 2018 and 2022. In her decision statement, Environment and Climate Change minister Catherine McKenna wrote the project “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.”
That conclusion ran contrary to serious concerns that environmental and fishing organizations have raised about the project (Read more…) including BP’s role in the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the proximity of the project to critical fish and marine mammal habitats, the company’s dependence on toxic chemical dispersants in the case of an oil spill, and a blowout containment strategy that would require at least two weeks to ship and equip a capping device from Norway.