Northern Gateway was a chronically-ill teenager before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, perhaps inspired by the assisted dying law his government passed earlier this year, finally put the long-suffering pipeline out of its misery for good this week.
Northern Gateway was born on March 6, 2002, when Calgary-based Enbridge announced it was exploring linking Alberta's oil sands to the Pacific Coast with a pipeline through Northern B.C. PetroChina offered to be Northern Gateway's godparent in 2005 but walked away when that 2010 completion date evaporated. Even Enbridge got frustrated in 2006, informing the National Energy Board that it would delay the project in favour of more promising opportunities in the U.S. market.
Behind the scenes, however, Northern Gateway was kept alive for four years.
Finally in the spring of 2010, Enbridge announced its detailed plans for the pipeline, ending at a tanker terminal in Kitimat.
Northern Gateway received its mortal wound that July, when an Enbridge pipeline in Michigan burst, spilling its contents into a creek feeding into the Kalamazoo River.
It took two years and nearly $700 million to clean up 3.3 million litres (imagine two Prince George Aquatic Centre pools) of Alberta oil sands bitumen.
Now there was no need to imagine what a spill of oil sands bitumen into a river system would look like. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board's investigation slapped a
$177 million fine on Enbridge and compared their sloppy cleanup efforts to the Keystone Kops.
Politicians in B.C. were already distancing themselves from the project by this point. Premier Christy Clark announced that she had five conditions that needed to be met before the B.C. government would approve the pipeline, including receiving a "fair share" of the proceeds. She went on to emphasize that Northern Gateway wasn't even close to making the grade.
Yet valiant efforts were made to save Northern Gateway.
In the fall of 2011, Enbridge appointed a longtime employee, Janet Holder, as the company's executive vice-president for western access to oversee Northern Gateway.
Born and raised in Prince George, Holder returned to her hometown to open an office and champion the pipeline. She did everything from shell out $52,500 for a Christmas tree at the 2012 Festival of Trees to benefit the Spirit of the North Healthcare Foundation to put her face on a major public relations push (remember the "meet Janet" ads?) for the pipeline in the fall of 2013.
Those efforts seemed to be paying off at first. The national review panel recommended construction of the pipeline, subject to 209 conditions, at the end of 2013, leading to formal approval by the federal government the following June.
The optimism that Northern Gateway might actually happen was shortlived. By the end of 2014, the court cases were piling up, the residents of Kitimat had rejected the pipeline in a community vote and Holder retired from Enbridge.
When news broke of her death in August 2015 after a long battle with leukemia, Northern Gateway lost its most passionate advocate.
During the federal election last fall, Trudeau spoke against Northern Gateway and oil tanker traffic on B.C.'s North Coast.
Then the federal court overturned approval of the pipeline this past summer, ruling that affected First Nations had not been adequately consulted. Neither the federal government nor Enbridge appealed the decision.
The company took Northern Gateway off life support when it quietly closed its Prince George office last month.
A coroner's inquest into Northern Gateway would find that the Kalamazoo spill and Enbridge's slow response was the catastrophic injury, with relentless opposition and waning public and political support contributing factors.
It's safe to say Kinder Morgan will do everything it can to avoid a similar obituary written for its planned Trans Mountain expansion.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
