Bad Deal: Senior Level Fisheries Job Points Toward Enbridge’s Northern Gateway’s Assured Future

If the Northern Gateway pipeline goes through, it could cause major damage to some of Alberta’s and British Columbia’s greatest trout, steelhead and salmon waters, and this new finding, leaked to the Vancouver Sun, suggests backdoor dealings make the pipeline pretty much a sure bet. Read and believe.

OTTAWA — Enbridge Inc.’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project is getting special attention from the federal Fisheries department, according to an internal email obtained by The Vancouver Sun.

In what critics call an unprecedented step, the department has listed a “Northern Gateway Liaison” at a top level of its organizational chart, under a reorganization prompted by the 2012 budget’s sweeping Fisheries Act amendments.

The position will report directly to the executive director of the National Ecosystems Management Branch at the department’s headquarters.

“This suggests an unprecedented level of access and engagement for a specific project,” said Green party leader Elizabeth May, who in the 1980s was a senior adviser to a federal environment minister. “This is the reality of a government that has told the bureaucracy, ‘be prepared to make sure this project goes through.’”

B.C. NDP MP Fin Donnelly, his party’s deputy fisheries critic, said he’s never heard of a company getting such special treatment. “This clearly exposes the Harper Conservative oil pipeline agenda. They are putting the oil industry ahead of fishing, tourism and all other industries.”

But the press secretary for acting Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Unprecedented+Fisheries+puts+focus+Northern+Gateway/7526769/story.html#ixzz2BpXygTZ9

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