The National Energy Board (NEB) has disentitled about 100 Burnaby residents from participating in the detailed route hearings for the new Kinder Morgan pipeline. This is because they failed to act on an email from an unknown person at a company they had not heard of, an email which was unintelligible and invited them to click on a link.
The beginning of this process was an invitation by the NEB to Burnaby residents last spring to submit statements of opposition to the detailed route planned for the pipeline through Burnaby; 135 such statements were submitted. On Oct. 4, the NEB issued its decisions; 28 people were granted a hearing and the remainder were to be allowed to apply to participate in the hearings. Trans Mountain was ordered to email this decision to all of the submitters by Oct. 17. Trans Mountain gave this task to its lawyer, with the result that the emails came from [email protected], the subject line was barely intelligible, and the email started with:
"Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC File Number OF-Fac-Oil-T260-2013-03 19
Dear Sir/Madam,
Pursuant to the National Energy Board’s Letter of Decision and Hearing Orders MH-032-2017 to MH-059-2017, please find enclosed for service upon you an English version of the Letter of Decision, Hearing Order and its appendices and cover letter.
The filings can also be viewed at receipts A86548 and A86549 or at the following links:"
There is no way anyone could have known that this had anything to do with the statements of opposition submitted half a year earlier.
I visited the houses of 17 of these people, and from the six who responded, I learned that one had received a FedEx package but the remaining five knew nothing. In retrospect, it is likely that all five had received an email but thought it was junk mail or phishing.
I then submitted a ,otion to the NEB to order that Trans Mountain repeat the service with a real and clear letter. Trans Mountain’s response was that what they did was ok. My response to that was that the NEB’s rules of practice and procedure stated that when email is used it is to be followed by a hard copy, which was not done, and in any case the NEB’s desire that people be informed was not achieved.
It took the NEB seven days to dismiss my motion. They could not argue that I was wrong, so instead invented a new rule, that a hard copy was not required. The NEB did not address the fact that people did not know that they could apply to participate in the hearings.
Thus, it is that 100 Burnaby residents were disentitled to participate in these hearings. Thus, also now the NEB allows unintelligible email from an unknown person at an unknown company inviting one to click on a link (a no-no) to be acceptable as "service."
David Huntley is a Burnaby resident
