Re: Roberts Bank Terminal Expansion

The Honourable Steven Guilbeault

Minister of Environment and Climate Change

and

Terry Hubbard

President, Impact Assessment Agency of Canada

Re: Roberts Bank Terminal Expansion

How many more Panels, Studies, and Agency/CEAA/FEARO Reviews, and Ministerial Decisions are needed before the continuing expansion of the Terminal and the environmental impacts are stopped at Roberts Bank?

As a former member and Secretary of the Roberts Bank Environmental Review Committee (RBERC) in the 1990s, I am well aware of the environmental impacts from the terminal and it’s expansion. The original Environmental Review Panel in 1979 recommended that the full port expansion at Roberts Bank not proceed of the then much smaller terminal. Yet expansion proceeded, and today is much more that had ever been envisioned. 

Numerous subsequent environmental reviews and studies spoke to the many important environmental impacts from the Terminal. And over the intervening years the Proponent keeps pushing, expanding, and now proposes another humongous expansion. And most recently provides “additional information” that changes little on the past, current, and future significant environmental impacts from the Roberts Bank Terminal. 

Canada needs to realize that one just can’t build and keep expanding a marine mega-terminal in Fraser River Estuary, one of Canada’s most valuable estuaries, without significantly impacting fisheries, shore birds, mud flats, air quality, migrating whales and a host of other very important environmental values.

The most recent Environmental Review Panel Report warns of numerous significant environmental effects, consistent with many other studies and experts saying the same thing.  In the language of environmental reviews, the word “significant” really means significant effects and which can not be meaningfully mitigated or eliminated.

Furthermore, the proposed conditions posted on the Agency website, although extensive, can not meaningfully mitigate or eliminate significant effects to non-significant levels.

In my long career as Environmental Engineer reviewing many industrial proposals at Environment Canada, we seldom used the “significant” word, since so many properly designed projects can be constructed so that impacts are manageable. Not the case at Roberts Bank. Wrong project at the wrong location. 

Minister Guilbeault, Members of Cabinet, and Agency reviewers, you must finally say “No more Expansion” at Roberts Bank.  Roberts Bank is our Ukraine. Please do not be a Putin to Roberts Bank.

B.Claus, P.Eng.

Grafton Bay, Bowen Island, B.C., <personal information removed>