With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/411627
64 BCBusiness december 2014 here's no sign on the door of Kinder Morgan Canada's project office in a Burnaby industrial park, and visitors have to be buzzed in. It's just a project office, of course, so maybe it's understand- able that the park's business direc- tory should list the tenants as that old apartment building standby, "Occupied." Then again, maybe it's just as well that the place is going plain- clothes, considering what some people around here have been saying about the company. People like, for example, Burnaby's popular longtime mayor, Derek Corrigan. In late September, the city released a poll showing that 68 per cent of its residents were opposed to the company's proposed expansion of its existing Trans Mountain pipeline, accompanied by comments from Cor- rigan that included "Burnaby residents don't want this pipeline to go any- where in this city—not through back yards and not through the conserva- tion area we passed laws to protect— and the city will continue to fully support its citizens' opposition." A week earlier, when the occasion was B.C. Supreme Court's refusal to grant an injunction forcing Kinder Morgan to stop survey work through that conservation area, known as Burnaby Mountain, he'd been even less diplomatic. "It's not the end of anything," Corrigan said in an official media release plastered across the homepage of the city's website. "It's another step in what we've always known will be a long fight to protect our conservation lands—and all of our land in the city—from further destruc- tion by Kinder Morgan." Kinder Morgan's proposed expan- sion of its Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs from Edmonton to the B.C. coast, would boost volumes from 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000. For most of the route, the impact of the expansion could be relatively minor, but in Burnaby it would require a much larger terminal and storage complex, and a routing that will have it either beside the original pipeline in a heavily built-up area or tunnelling under that nature reserve. Polls show that public attitudes toward pipeline projects of any kind have hardened throughout British Columbia, so Burnaby and its mayor are not alone in their opposi- tion. And, of course, there are pipeline supporters too—especially in Interior centres like Kamloops, which stand to grab a chunk of the estimated $5.4 billion that will be spent on the Trans Mountain expansion while experienc- ing little inconvenience and dangers that aren't appreciably greater than the ones they've lived with, mostly without issue, for six decades. Beginning early next year, the expansion's proponents, opponents and other interveners (who fall somewhere in the middle or who have their own specific concerns) will appear before a National Energy Board panel. Because pipelines are feder- ally regulated, the panel's decision, slated for early 2016, will trump any further obstacles that jurisdictions like Burnaby can put in the way. So in the months leading up to that decision, the rhetoric, already heated, can only be expected to get hotter. InsIde the BurnaBy project office sits Kinder Morgan presi- dent Ian Anderson, Corrigan's rival in this battle for Burnaby's hearts and minds. Although based at the firm's Calgary head office, Anderson has found himself spending about half of his time here in the Vancouver suburb where the pipeline terminates. That's been tricky, considering that, beyond the expansion, he still has a company to run—and not a tiny one at that. Kinder Morgan Canada has its roots in the 2005 acquisition of Terasen Inc. by a division of Kinder Morgan Inc., the third largest energy company on T Peter Milobar, mayor of Kamloops.