Indigenous band could have been more help, says judge in Wisconsin Line 5 dispute

Fresh nuts, bolts and fittings are ready to be added to the east leg of the pipeline near St. Ignace as Enbridge prepares to test the east and west sides of the Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac in Mackinaw City, Mich. on June 8, 2017. North America’s existential debate about the virtues and dangers of oil and gas pipelines faces a critical test today in Wisconsin. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Detroit News, Dale G Young

By James McCarten in Washington

The Indigenous band in Wisconsin that’s trying to shut down the Line 5 pipeline got a chilly reception Thursday from a federal court judge who is dismayed they aren’t doing more to help Enbridge Inc. avoid an ecological disaster.

The Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa has asked district court Judge William Conley to order the pipeline shut down, fearing that heavy flooding last month could cause the line to spring a leak on their territory.

But from the outset of Thursday’s hearing, it was clear Conley — who ordered the two sides to work together last fall on finding a solution to their impasse — doesn’t believe the band is holding up its end of the bargain.

“The band has not helped itself by refusing to take any steps to prevent a catastrophic failure,” Conley said as the hearing got underway. “You haven’t even allowed simple steps that would have prevented some of this erosion.”

The day-long hearing ended without a decision on the band’s request for an injunction — and with the clear sense Conley is disinclined to grant one. “It’s an extraordinary request to make when the band is doing nothing,” he said.

But band lawyer Riyaz Kanji said he was pleased during an otherwise discouraging day that the judge gave indications he would establish a threshold for erosion damage that would trigger a shutdown.

“Unfortunately, from our point of view, he didn’t set that today — he’s not shutting it down,” Kanji said. “But we will remain hopeful that he will set a standard that will protect the river and its precious resources.”

Conley, who has already ruled that the band was entitled back in 2013 to revoke permission for the pipeline, was also unwilling to grant the injunction on the grounds that Enbridge no longer has the right to access the area.

“The harder thing to hear was that the judge appears unwilling … to issue an injunction because of Enbridge’s continuing trespass on the band’s lands,” Kanji said.

“It sounds like he’s thinking more in terms of financial penalties.”

In court documents, Enbridge has accused the band of being focused on a single outcome: the permanent closure of the pipeline on their territory “while refusing much less extreme alternative measures.”

The band argues that several weeks of flooding along the Bad River last month has washed away so much of the riverbank and supporting terrain that a breach is “imminent” and a shutdown order more than justified.

Enbridge insists the dangers are being overstated — and even if they were real, the company’s court-ordered contingency plan, which spells out the steps it would take, would be a far more rational solution.

“Enbridge will pre-emptively purge and shut down the line well in advance of any potential rupture,” the company says in its court brief, adding that the area remains under constant 24-hour video surveillance.

“Any flooding and erosion has not, and would not, catch Enbridge by surprise.”

But Enbridge has been rebuffed in its efforts to perform remedial work on the site, which would include using sandbacks and trees to fortify the riverbanks — a decision band chairman Mike Wiggins defended Thursday.

The band has the right under federal law to enforce its own water quality standards, which were “developed by careful evaluation of our relationships, as a people, with different parts of our hydrology in the Bad River watershed,” Wiggins told a news conference after the hearing.

“What was kind of put forward today was, ‘None of that stuff should matter. None of that stuff should exist. When Enbridge came knocking, you should have just let them do whatever they want,'” he said.

“We disagree.”

Heavy flooding that began in early April washed away significant portions of the riverbank where Line 5 intersects the Bad River, a meandering, 120-kilometre course that feeds Lake Superior and a complex network of ecologically delicate wetlands.

The band has been in court with Enbridge since 2019 in an effort to compel the pipeline’s owner and operator to reroute Line 5 around its traditional territory — something the company has already agreed to do.

But the flooding has turned a theoretical risk into a very real one, the band argues, and time is now of the essence. Lawyers for the band and its supporters were scheduled to hold a news conference after the hearing.

Line 5 meets the river just past a location the court has come to know as the “meander,” where the riverbed snakes back and forth multiple times, separated from itself only by several metres of forest and the pipeline itself.

At four locations, the river was less than 4.6 metres from the pipeline — just 3.4 metres in one particular spot — and the erosion has only continued.

The neighbouring state of Michigan, led by Attorney General Dana Nessel, has been waging its own war against Line 5, fearing a leak in the Straits of Mackinac, the ecologically delicate waterway where the pipeline crosses the Great Lakes.

“The alarming erosion at the Bad River meander poses an imminent threat of irreparable harm to Lake Superior which far outweighs the risk of impacts associated with a shutdown of the Line 5 pipeline,” Nessel argues in her brief.

“Without judicial intervention, it is likely that this irreparable harm will be inflicted not only on the band, but also on Michigan, its residents, and its natural resources.”

The economic arguments against shutting down the pipeline, which carries 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily across Wisconsin and Michigan to refineries in Sarnia, Ont., are by now well-known.

Line 5’s defenders, which include the federal government, say a shutdown would cause major economic disruption across the Prairies and the U.S. Midwest, where it provides feedstock to refineries in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It also supplies key refining facilities in Ontario and Quebec, and is vital to the production of jet fuel for major airports on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, including Detroit Metropolitan and Pearson International in Toronto.

A lengthy statement issued Tuesday by the Canadian Embassy warned of severe economic consequences of shutting down the line, as well as the potential ramifications for bilateral relations.

“The energy security of both Canada and the United States would be directly impacted by a Line 5 closure,” the statement said. Some 33,000 U.S. jobs and US$20 billion in economic activity would be at stake, it added.

“At a time of heightened concern over energy security and supply, including during the energy transition, maintaining and protecting existing infrastructure should be a top priority.”

Talks have been ongoing for months under the terms of a 1977 pipelines treaty between the two countries that effectively prohibits either country from unilaterally closing off the flow of hydrocarbons.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 18, 2023.

— With files from The Associated Press

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Canada is failing dismally at our climate goals. We’re also ruining our economy.

Published on November 20, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari

Short-term climate pledges simply chase deadlines, not results

The annual meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP, which is dedicated to implementing international action on climate change, is now underway in Brazil. Like other signatories to the Paris Agreement, Canada is required to provide a progress update on our pledge to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. After decades of massive government spending and heavy-handed regulations aimed at decarbonizing our economy, we’re far from achieving that goal. It’s time for Canada to move past arbitrary short-term goals and deadlines, and instead focus on more effective ways to support climate objectives.

Since signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, the federal government has introduced dozens of measures intended to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, including more than $150 billion in “green economy” spending, the national carbon tax, the arbitrary cap on emissions imposed exclusively on the oil and gas sector, stronger energy efficiency requirements for buildings and automobiles, electric vehicle mandates, and stricter methane regulations for the oil and gas industry.

Recent estimates show that achieving the federal government’s target will impose significant costs on Canadians, including 164,000 job losses and a reduction in economic output of 6.2 per cent by 2030 (compared to a scenario where we don’t have these measures in place). For Canadian workers, this means losing $6,700 (each, on average) annually by 2030.

Yet even with all these costly measures, Canada will only achieve 57 per cent of its goal for emissions reductions. Several studies have already confirmed that Canada, despite massive green spending and heavy-handed regulations to decarbonize the economy over the past decade, remains off track to meet its 2030 emission reduction target.

And even if Canada somehow met its costly and stringent emission reduction target, the impact on the Earth’s climate would be minimal. Canada accounts for less than 2 per cent of global emissions, and that share is projected to fall as developing countries consume increasing quantities of energy to support rising living standards. In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), emerging and developing economies are driving 80 per cent of the growth in global energy demand. Further, IEA projects that fossil fuels will remain foundational to the global energy mix for decades, especially in developing economies. This means that even if Canada were to aggressively pursue short-term emission reductions and all the economic costs it would imposes on Canadians, the overall climate results would be negligible.

Rather than focusing on arbitrary deadline-contingent pledges to reduce Canadian emissions, we should shift our focus to think about how we can lower global GHG emissions. A recent study showed that doubling Canada’s production of liquefied natural gas and exporting to Asia to displace an equivalent amount of coal could lower global GHG emissions by about 1.7 per cent or about 630 million tonnes of GHG emissions. For reference, that’s the equivalent to nearly 90 per cent of Canada’s annual GHG emissions. This type of approach reflects Canada’s existing strength as an energy producer and would address the fastest-growing sources of emissions, namely developing countries.

As the 2030 deadline grows closer, even top climate advocates are starting to emphasize a more pragmatic approach to climate action. In a recent memo, Bill Gates warned that unfounded climate pessimism “is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Even within the federal ministry of Environment and Climate Change, the tone is shifting. Despite the 2030 emissions goal having been a hallmark of Canadian climate policy in recent years, in a recent interview, Minister Julie Dabrusin declined to affirm that the 2030 targets remain feasible.

Instead of scrambling to satisfy short-term national emissions limits, governments in Canada should prioritize strategies that will reduce global emissions where they’re growing the fastest.

Annika Segelhorst

Junior Economist

Elmira Aliakbari

Director, Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute

Alberta

Carney government’s anti-oil sentiment no longer in doubt

Published on November 19, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

The Carney government, which on Monday survived a confidence vote in Parliament by the skin of its teeth, recently released a “second tranche of nation-building projects” blessed by the Major Projects Office. To have a chance to survive Canada’s otherwise oppressive regulatory gauntlet, projects must get on this Caesar-like-thumbs-up-thumbs-down list.

The first tranche of major projects released in September included no new oil pipelines but pertained largely to natural gas, nuclear power, mineral production, etc. The absence of proposed oil pipelines was not surprising, as Ottawa’s regulatory barricade on oil production means no sane private company would propose such a project. (The first tranche carries a price tag of $60 billion in government/private-sector spending.)

Now, the second tranche of projects also includes not a whiff of support for oil production, transport and export to non-U.S. markets. Again, not surprising as the prime minister has done nothing to lift the existing regulatory blockade on oil transport out of Alberta.

So, what’s on the latest list?

There’s a “conservation corridor” for British Columbia and Yukon; more LNG projects (both in B.C.); more mineral projects (nickel, graphite, tungsten—all electric vehicle battery constituents); and still more transmission for “clean energy”—again, mostly in B.C. And Nunavut comes out ahead with a new hydro project to power Iqaluit. (The second tranche carries a price tag of $58 billion in government/private-sector spending.)

No doubt many of these projects are worthy endeavours that shouldn’t require the imprimatur of the “Major Projects Office” to see the light of day, and merit development in the old-fashioned Canadian process where private-sector firms propose a project to Canada’s environmental regulators, get necessary and sufficient safety approval, and then build things.

However, new pipeline projects from Alberta would also easily stand on their own feet in that older regulatory regime based on necessary and sufficient safety approval, without the Carney government additionally deciding what is—or is not—important to the government, as opposed to the market, and without provincial governments and First Nations erecting endless barriers.

Regardless of how you value the various projects on the first two tranches, the second tranche makes it crystal clear (if it wasn’t already) that the Carney government will follow (or double down) on the Trudeau government’s plan to constrain oil production in Canada, particularly products derived from Alberta’s oilsands. There’s nary a mention that these products even exist in the government’s latest announcement, despite the fact that the oilsands are the world’s fourth-largest proven reserve of oil. This comes on the heels on the Carney government’s first proposed budget, which also reified the government’s fixation to extinguish greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, continue on the path to “net-zero 2050” and retain Canada’s all-EV new car future beginning in 2036.

It’s clear, at this point, that the Carney government is committed to the policies of the previous Liberal government, has little interest in harnessing the economic value of Canada’s oil holdings nor the potential global influence Canada might exert by exporting its oil products to Asia, Europe and other points abroad. This policy fixation will come at a significant cost to future generations of Canadians.