Calgary, Alberta, Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Welcome.
- I want to begin by thanking you all for taking the time to be here today.
- The focus of this forum is safety and I don’t think I could over-state the importance of the discussions we will be having over the next two days.
- The fact that so many of you have joined us to have a focused and forward-looking conversation about safety in our industry is tremendously positive and I think it speaks to our common understanding that safety and environmental protection is - has to be - our Number One job.
- As many of you know already I have been travelling extensively this winter and spring, meeting with municipal leaders, first responders, environmental groups and so on, speaking about pipeline safety and environmental protection across Canada as part of an NEB National Engagement Initiative.
I can assure you that when you distil community concerns down to their essence, absolutely everyone is concerned about the same thing: safety.
So I want to frame our discussion for the next two days around:
- the feedback and ideas and concerns I am hearing from Canadians,
- and how we in this room can work together towards best practices and responsive solutions.
This forum was designed as a space where we can:
- have an open exchange of information on technical pipeline issues
- increase our mutual understanding of stakeholder concerns, and
- consider opportunities that both industry and regulators can take to improve safety outcomes to better protect people, property and the environment.
*Pause
- Pipeline companies, their service providers and the regulators are technical experts.
- We are the people who can recommend improvements, drive change, and instill safety culture in our organizations. The ball is on our court and we need to challenge ourselves to up our game and really think beyond “business as usual”.
- That’s what this forum is about.
So - What exactly did Canadians have to say to me? Well... quite a lot!
- And as you can well imagine the specifics varied from group to group, town to town and region to region.
- Now, In a few minutes I will invite a couple of NEB colleagues who accompanied me during my travels, to talk a little more about who we have met with, what we have heard - especially from that regional perspective.
But to sum up what we heard in general terms, the common themes during our meetings included:
- the need for people, water and land to be protected from possible pipeline failures
- the assurance that, if a pipeline incident occurred, the authorities would be able to respond swiftly and appropriately.
- And the desire from all stakeholders to continue to build and develop their relationships with the NEB and the industry so they are better informed about the pipeline activity in their communities.
I don’t think anyone at the Board will disagree with me when I state that we at the NEB haven’t been good at engagement outside of our hearing process.
- We processed our applications and regulated operating pipelines quietly and efficiently, and people provided little feedback.
- And then something changed. Macondo happened. Kalamazoo happened. Social media lit up about climate change.
- People began to get a lot more interested in what the regulator was doing to keep the public safe and to protect the environment.
And they got a lot more interested in our hearing processes, because they thought that that was our only function as a Board. So we had a change where applications that attracted few intervenors a few years before suddenly had hundreds.
- Processes that seemed pretty straightforward to us as a quasi-judicial tribunal seemed murky and perhaps unfair to them.
- Once a hearing was over few seemed to know what we did, from that point onward
This was a key learning. People really didn’t understand that the NEB is a lifecycle regulator and that we regulate a project from start to finish.
- So as a life cycle regulator the NEB needs to be a better partner with impacted individuals and communities,
- and share more information not just on how we get to a facility approval (or denial), but also,
- how we go about ensuring public safety and environmental protection for the life of a pipeline
- We also require the companies under our jurisdiction to regularly communicate with and involve impacted landowners and communities. From what I have seen, companies are getting better at engagement and realizing that this cannot be just a PR exercise. The conversations must be genuine, respectful and authentic.
- Now more than ever there is a need to engage beyond the technical aspects of a project. It is about understanding community values and expectations, and taking a more holistic approach to ensure we protect what is most important to them.
- The public expects all of us to work together - regulators, industry and communities - to achieve better outcomes.
- As an example of the NEB engaging differently, we have committed to a Memorandum of Understanding with the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal - the Montreal Municipal Community - to better share information about regulatory activities, industry performance and community concerns in the area. This engagement process is different for us, but demonstrates our commitment to being a better regulator at the local level.
- We must continue to demonstrate exactly how our life cycle regulatory oversight, coupled with an emerging focus on safety culture, keeps the product in the pipe.
- It is not good enough to merely state 99.9995 per cent of liquids are transported safely.
- When we do this, I believe that people get the impression that we are complacent, resting on our laurels and not fearful ourselves that something could go wrong.
- People want to know and have confidence that we are always on guard, that we are wary about our performance and that of our systems, and that we are doing things even when it might not seem to be required, to ensure safety first!
- People want to know that we know our business...but this is not sufficient... they also want to know we care and that we are genuinely committed to them and their communities.
- This is how we build public trust.
Another area where I see room for improvement is around emergency response planning.
- The public must have confidence that we have good plans in place and that we are able to execute the plans.
- But... how can they have confidence if we keep our plans confidential... if we discount the value of engaging with them because they aren’t experts and don’t have a need to know?
- So, the challenge is to stop behaving like we are indifferent to concerns such as this, and start engaging more comprehensively with people and communities on these issues..
- We also need to be mindful not just of our plans and responsibilities, but also of the needs and capabilities of other players in the emergency management systems that we all rely on, if anything goes wrong.
- Emergency preparedness and response is not just something that happens between the company and the regulator and its time we fully understood the implications of that.
The NEB has in recent years made some good strides forward in being more transparent in our work:
- We post enforcement actions online for public access.
- We have a Pipeline Safety and Environmental Protection Dashboard, updated quarterly, that tracks company performance on our web site...
- ... and we have just created an online map that shows Canadians where pipeline incidents have occurred.
- I will note that people are very interested in and appreciative of the information that we make available. It is helping inform people, and it is giving them a sense of what we do and how we do it.
- I commented to one of my staff recently that even the media that I have spoken to over the last few months seem genuinely engaged and glad to be getting the information, hearing another side of the story or able to complete a story about energy issues with information from the regulator.
Now we are looking to industry to follow suit... particularly, as I mentioned, when it comes to critical pieces of information like emergency response plans, which so directly and substantially involve not only the company and the regulator, but the communities where these plans would be implemented.
- The NEB is moving forward, in this social media, anti-Oil Sands, post-Macando/Kalamazoo environment.
- Our three strategic priorities are Taking Action on Safety, Engaging with Canadians and Leading Regulatory Excellence.
- I know with absolute certainty that my fellow Board Members and the approximately 450 technical staff we have supporting us are passionate and deeply committed to each of these things. Our focus is clear.
- My invitation and my challenge to you here today is just the same.
- How are you moving forward? What are you going to do with this new, very public operating environment?
- What are you going to do, in collaboration with others, to ensure that your projects - your systems, your organizations - are managed with safety and environmental protection as the primary goal?
- What are you going to do to improve on “business as usual”?
- How will you tell that story to Canadians, and how will you earn their trust?
- It is my hope that some of the answers start to form here today. I am looking around and I know we have the right people in the room. It only remains to have the conversation.
Now - I want to share in a little more depth, what we heard from Canadians - and I am going to ask a couple of colleagues to join me to add their observations to the discussion... ROBERT STEPS IN...
