The Energy East Pipeline Project has not been labelled as a threat to North Bay's sole source of drinking water.
At least, not yet.
The city’s manager of Planning Services, Beverley Hillier, presented the new Source Water Protection Plan amendments to council last Monday.
Some of the policies focus on prohibiting the storage of agricultural source material, the handling and storage of non-agricultural source material and commercial fertilizer, and the use of lands as livestock grazing or pasturing land, among others.
The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change approved the North Bay-Mattawa area plan in early March, but as Mayor Al McDonald called attention to during last Monday’s meeting, a crucial component seems to be missing.
McDonald raised concern for the Energy East Project not being included in the current amendments, despite being signaled as a potential risk by the Minister in March.
“We’re taking a strong stance in protecting our only source of drinking water, and I would hate to get to the National Energy Board and them pull up a document that says ‘you didn’t even show your concern in your own plan,'” McDonald said during the meeting.
“I think from a council perspective, the fact that we take that stance be included in this somewhere,” he added.
Hillier explained that, despite the Ministry’s identifying it as a threat, the Minister’s letter simply gives the local source protection authority the ability to do the necessary research to implement an Energy East amendment.
“As part of the approval process, the Minister did identify that it could be included as a local threat,” said Hiller. “However, additional work would be required to incorporate that into that plan, and that additional work has not been done up to this stage.
“What we are dealing with is amending the plan that is in place, and should any future amendments to the plan occur because of proposals like Energy East, then those amendments would be brought forward,” she added.
Communities in Ontario are required to develop the Source Protection Plans under the Clean Water Act in order to protect municipal sources of drinking water.
The plans basically identify the risks to the water sources and put strategies and policies in place to reduce or eliminate the threats altogether.
But the city is required to make any changes to the Official Plan and zoning bylaw in order to implement the source protection plan policies, bringing the policies into conformity with the plan.
North Bay's Official Plan amendment was discussed at the committee level last Monday, but Community Services chairman Mark King decided to leave it there for another two weeks after McDonald's recommendation.
The protection plan has been an ongoing development with significant public consultation since the process became mandatory in 2005, well before the Energy East proposal came into play.
Click here for the table of policies affecting North Bay: http://goo.gl/GcRisY
But McDonald brought the issue back to the forefront by circulating a letter from the Ministry of Environment stating the Energy East Proposal could be a significant risk.
“If that’s going to be included in the Source Protection Plan, there’s a significant amount of work that needs to be done in order to determine the risk associated with that proposal on the municipal drinking water source,” Hillier said after the meeting.
“We won’t have any information in two weeks, four weeks or perhaps even the next year or so to include in the Official Plan with respect to Energy East because it’s not approved at this stage,” she added.
The preliminary pipeline project design calls for the conversion of the pipeline that crosses several tributaries of Trout Lake, North Bay’s sole source of drinking water. Some of those waterways include Chippewa Creek, Doran’s Creek and Four Mile Creek.
TransCanada has said the pipeline would carry between 500,000 and 850,000 barrels of the diluted bitumen per day across Northern Ontario alone. North Bay would be the largest community in Northeast Ontario that the proposed pipeline would run through.
In an attempt to defend the potential risks to the city’s sole source of drinking water, both the City of North Bay and North Bay-Mattawa Conservation Authority have applied as interveners in the National Energy Board hearings.
Monday’s public meeting garnered no public presentations, but there will eventually be an open house component of the process. The date for that meeting has not been announced yet.
The issue will come before the committee again on the July 13 meeting.
For more on the previous public reaction to the Energy East proposal, click here: http://goo.gl/sjfMMq
