Wawa-news.com Local and Regional News
A proposed pipeline announced by Ontario Premier Doug Ford yesterday is getting a thumbs down from environment and climate groups in northern Ontario, who frame it as being “all risk and no rewards” for northern Ontario.
The 3,300 km pipeline will slice across northern Ontario, following a route that appears – based on the very generalized route map released to date – to generally follow the natural gas mainline, which several years ago was the subject of huge controversy when TransCanada proposed to convert one of the lines to transport bitumen (a thick sticky form of petroleum). Announced in 2013, the Energy East project was widely opposed but dropped in 2017 before going to a public hearing.
Being built to ship 500,000 barrels of crude oil with the potential to expand to 800,000 barrels per day, there are large questions about markets and financial backers for the proposed Northern Shield pipeline, particularly with the announcement coming immediately after the federal government and Province of Alberta announced the West Coast pipeline, which purportedly would move more than one million barrels per day.
Northwatch project coordinator Brennain Lloyd said that while the project is more likely to be another Doug Ford photo op than an actual viable project, concerned residents can’t afford to not respond to the project given the huge impacts the project would have.
“First there’s the level of disturbance – to land, water bodies, ecosystems, other land users – along the route if a new pipeline was to be constructed”, commented Lloyd, noting the high level of physical impacts from the natural gas pipeline and pipeline expansion when they were constructed several decades ago.
“Second, a rupture or failure to the pipeline could result in a catastrophic release of crude oil, which would have serious local and potentially downstream impacts. Finally, something of concern for all Canadians, not just residents along the route: a project to pull more hydrocarbons out of the ground and rush them to market is simply the wrong way to go. We’re in climate crisis, and all efforts should be to phase out oil and gas, not promote and expand it”.
Lloyd notes that the project was first announced in July 2025. A feasibility study was to have been undertaken as part of that announcement, but yesterday’s announcement – a year later – indicates that the result of a feasibility study will not be available until sometime later this year.
Northwatch is a regional coalition of environmental organizations, community groups and individual members in northeastern Ontario.
Founded in January of 1988, Northwatch has as a priority issues that are of a regional nature: sound energy planning, healthy forests, responsible mining, waste reduction, and conservation of our natural resources and environmental assets. Northwatch has worked with residents over the past two decades to prevent northeastern Ontario from becoming the receiving ground for foreign wastes, whether it’s Toronto’s garbage, Ontario’s biomedical waste, Canada’s nuclear reactor fuel waste, or PCB’s from around the world.
- Today at LSPP – Wednesday, July 8th - July 8, 2026
- Proposed Northern Shield Energy Corridor –All Risk and No Reward for Northern Ontario - July 8, 2026
- Forest Fire Update – July 7 - July 8, 2026
