Dismantle National Energy Board, create bodies for regulation, growth: panel
OTTAWA — A panel advising the government on how to overhaul the National Energy Board says Canada’s current system for reviewing and regulating energy projects is broken and facing a crisis of confidence in the eyes of the public.
The five-member panel, appointed by Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr, delivered a 100-page report Monday that calls for a full-blown rethink of how the system works, including the dismantling of the National Energy Board into two separate agencies, along with a comprehensive and coherent national energy policy to guide them.
“Today the regulatory function is making de facto policy through its decisions,” says the report, which followed several months of public hearings and meetings with stakeholders.
Without a functioning national energy policy, the panel concluded, the board has an impossible task: regulating the growth of the industry while marrying that growth with the government’s economic and climate-change goals.