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Video Stories - Jake Epp - Transcript

First of all congratulations to all people who have been associated with the National Energy Board for 50 years, that's a long time for a regulatory agency. People have asked me what was it like at the National Energy Board when I was Minister of Energy and Mines and Resources. Well, first of all I was very well served by members of the Board and most particularly its Chairman, Roland Priddle, professional, and a good human being. And I remember Roland would come into the office with a written points that he wanted some exchange of views and at the end of it he would of course fold his paper and walk out of the room and go on with the job that he had. Just to finish that little vignette, Roland, when I came to TransCanada Pipelines, and of course NEB had moved to Calgary at that time, he wrote me a little note, he says, 'Congratulations. I know you always wanted a window on the industry, but isn't this a little close?'. And in typical Roland fashion he had a little P.S. at the bottom of it, he said, 'Please destroy after reading.' But the relationship between the NEB and I think largely because of Roland, worked very well.

What were the issues of the day? The issues of the day, well first of all we moved the National Energy Board to Calgary from Ottawa. It was controversial to say the least but I had a very specific view on this along with the Prime Minister, and that was that national institutions, such as the NEB, some of them have to be the visible face of the central government, the national government, in the regions of Canada, and I thought the NEB in Calgary was a natural fit. The issues were, there were a lot of them at the time. Remember we had just signed the Free Trade Agreement, and the Free Trade Agreement was going to modify the relationship of how does the NEB look at cross-border trade. What is the jurisdiction, and how will we implement both free trade and yet the NEB holding its responsibilities under the NEB Act. We had other projects, the Vancouver Island pipeline, Hibernia, and that, shall we say, small detail of how do you get the provincial governments a piece of the offshore, which of course became known as the East Coast Offshore Agreement, the results of which are still, shall we say, in public debate from time to time today. So those were the atmospherics at the time, but, to conclude, I was very well served, I believe Canada was very well served by the NEB and its leadership and its members. It made the transition to Calgary, it made the transition to a free trade climate, and it brought on the projects in a regulatory fashion, projects that Canadians and the industry needed.

What's the result? The result is pretty simple. Canada today is a large energy producer, not only in fossils but also in electricity, cross-border trade is large and we are the largest energy supplier to our neighbors to the south. The NEB has been part of all of that and so the 50 years have been marked by a lot of success, but overarching all of it, they always looked at the public interest, and in the public interest I've sold the NEB concept, that is, resource ownership is with the people. The NEB has the responsibility to make sure that every party is able to function within that reality, and the NEB's done a good job.

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Date Modified:

2011-10-26