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TransCanada Corp.’s twin-cities news conference Thursday to announce the filing of its Energy East application to the National Energy Board was pipeline theatre at its finest.
After 18 months of planning, the company presented to the world a 30,000-page document — filling 68 binders in 11 official-looking boxes — to provide evidence in support of the $12-billion project.
The Calgary-based company pulled out all the stops: There were panels of top executives in both Toronto and Quebec City to explain the benefits, representatives of business, trade unions, and municipalities present to demonstrate the depth and breadth of support, simultaneous French/English translation and no question left unanswered — about whether the project threatens beluga whales, whether it contributes to climate change or whether the company deserves to be trusted given some recent incidents in its system.
“At over 30,000 pages, the document is one of the most extensive regulatory applications ever developed in our history,” Russ Girling, president and CEO of TransCanada told media in Toronto. “The final result is a body of work that I believe achieves what we set out to do many months ago, and that is to listen — we listened to communities, businesses, governments, landowners and other stakeholders across this country.”
Homework was over the top. There were consultations with 5,000 landowners, more than 160 First Nations and Metis communities, 7,000 people in 100 open houses during the past 18 months across six provinces, said Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s executive vice-president and president of development.
It’s part of the energy industry’s adaptation to a ‘social-licence’ obsessed world. Gone are the days when the merits of pipelines were debated at dry evidence-based regulatory hearings.
With environmental organization targeting new pipeline projects to fight climate change, today’s debate is in cyberspace and on the streets, where facts are selective and voices loud. Reluctant in the past to engage with their detractors, pipeline companies are now moving aggressively to influence public opinion before others do it for them, fuelling fear and mistrust.
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