Watch above: A day after the federal government gave the green light for the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, Conservative MPs weren’t exactly selling the controversial project. Vassy Kapelos reports.
OTTAWA – A day after accepting a review panel’s recommendation to impose more than 200 conditions on the Northern Gateway project, a government spokesman is now insisting the Conservatives have not approved the pipeline.
Instead, it’s just “a maybe,” a spokesman for Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford says.
“It’s a ‘maybe,’” Chris McCluskey wrote in a tweet Wednesday.
READ MORE: Feds aren’t only ones unsure about approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline
McCluskey was responding to a tweet by Global News that reported NDP Leader Tom Mulcair was slamming the government for issuing a short news release approving the pipeline project, while none of the 21 Conservative MPs from British Columbia spoke out.
WATCH: Thomas Mulcair accuses B.C. Conservatives of being in “the witness protection program”
On Tuesday, the Conservative government announced it had accepted an independent panel’s recommendation to impose 209 conditions on the Northern Gateway proposal.
“Today constitutes another step in the process,” Rickford said in a news release.
A federal joint review said in December that the pipeline project is in the public interest, but provided Enbridge with a list of 209 conditions that would need to be met before the project can come to B.C.
The 1,177-kilometre, $6.5-billion Northern Gateway project would transport 525,000 barrels per day of oil products from outside Edmonton to Kitimat on the northern B.C. coast.
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