Opinion: Why maintaining the North Coast oil tanker moratorium is of utmost importance

Bruce Reid is a registered pro­fes­sional bio­lo­gist (RPBio, retired) who worked for DFO in B.C. for 37 years, includ­ing as regional man­ager of the Oceans Pro­gram for the Pacific region. He spe­cial­izes in mar­ine and river hab­itat pro­tec­tion.
27 Nov 2025

As a res­ult of my extens­ive know­ledge of the region, I'm acutely aware of the issues that led to the rejec­tion of the ori­ginal North­ern Gate­way Pipeline, as well as the neces­sity of the oil tanker ban in the envir­on­ment­ally sens­it­ive and tur­bu­lent North Coast waters.

Warm­ing ocean and river tem­per­at­ures and con­tinu­ing drought con­di­tions are increas­ingly wreak­ing havoc on exist­ing sal­mon pop­u­la­tions and the viab­il­ity of many other aquatic spe­cies. It's my under­stand­ing that the former pro­posed North­ern Gate­way Pipeline route would have crossed up to an estim­ated 1,000 water­courses, put­ting a wealth of spawn­ing and fish-bear­ing hab­it­ats at fur­ther risk in the event of pipeline con­struc­tion impacts, pipeline leaks or oil spills.

The Skeena River is the second-largest sal­mon-bear­ing river in Canada and a major eco­nomic driver in the region. Just one oil spill in the area would be cata­strophic for spawn­ing adults and juven­iles.

Accord­ing to stud­ies con­duc­ted by Simon Fraser Uni­versity and First Nation sci­ent­ists, it has been estim­ated that up to one bil­lion juven­ile sal­mon migrate through the estu­ary of this river annu­ally.

This north­ern pipeline pro­posal was rejec­ted sev­eral years ago for sound ... thor­oughly researched reas­ons.
As stated in the NSB MPA Ini­ti­at­ive Net­work Action Plan, the North Coast is rich and diverse in terms of biod­iversity of spe­cies, cul­ture and hab­it­ats, and sup­ports an oceans eco­nomy of $1.3 bil­lion (GDP in 2018) dir­ectly employ­ing over 11,000 people. There are a large num­ber of mar­ine pro­tec­ted areas as well as sev­eral endangered spe­cies in these waters that could be fur­ther imper­illed by ves­sel strikes, noise dis­turb­ance and oil spills.

A fur­ther crit­ical con­sid­er­a­tion is that the waters of Hec­ate Strait can be extremely volat­ile and treach­er­ous, with a rocky and heav­ily artic­u­lated coast­line. These con­di­tions greatly increase the risks of an oil spill.

Due to these imped­i­ments, pre­vent­ing dam­age from such a spill would be excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult, poten­tially caus­ing longterm cata­strophic harm to the mar­ine eco­sys­tem and to those spe­cies har­ves­ted by First Nations, com­mer­cial and recre­ational fish­ers.

For these reas­ons, the Pacific North Coast is abso­lutely the wrong place to be run­ning bitu­men pipelines and ship­ping it in tankers, given the extremely ser­i­ous and con­sequen­tial envir­on­mental risks involved. This north­ern pipeline pro­posal was rejec­ted sev­eral years ago for sound and thor­oughly researched reas­ons. These con­tinue to be just as rel­ev­ant today.

Click link to read the Vancouver Sun opinion article - https://vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/opinion-maintaining-the-north-coast-oil-tanker-moratorium-is-of-utmost-importance

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