Canada's National Energy Board has failed to monitor the construction and maintenance activities of the nation's top pipeline shippers and enforce safety mandates, said Julie Gelfand, commissioner of environment and sustainable development in the office of the auditor general. In a report released in January, Gelfand said the regulator struggled to track companies' compliance with pipeline approval requirements, lacked emergency-response preparedness and needed more skilled engineering capacity.
The release of the audit comes at critical point for pipeline development efforts in Canada. Supporters say pipelines could help lower the nation's trade deficit and diversify markets for oil and natural-gas resources, but environmentalists and an increasingly skeptical general public question the government's ability to regulate the oil-and-gas industry. When the audit was released, the National Energy Board (NEB) was conducting hearings on Kinder Morgan's proposed $5.8-billion Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project in Burnaby, British Columbia, while hundreds of local residents and environmentalists protested the project.