It's Justin's National Energy Board Now and It's Still Bent - By Choice?

Today's National Energy Board has become synonymous with "dirty pool." New revelations show it's dirtier than anyone imagined.

Harper did an excellent job stuffing the NEB with industry shills. Trudeau promised to clean house and restore public confidence in the oil and gas regulator. He lied.

National Energy Board panelists have been meeting in secret with business leaders, including former premier Jean Charest who was working for Energy East’s TransCanada, in an obvious contravention of their mandate to conduct a public and unbiased process.

At first, the NEB vehemently denied that any discussion of Energy East took place. The public only knows the true story now (or at least some of it) because the regulator was forced to recant as De Souza’s investigative reporting and access to information requests forced them to release details.

TransCanada is being cagey. Despite repeated promises of transparency, the company still has not confirmed what it knew about the meeting. Common sense makes it hard to imagine a high level meeting with a former premier on company payroll could go unnoted. But confirmation would mean the company knowingly tampered with the NEB process.

The revelations are explosive. The NEB has the powers of a federal court. Imagine if a three-member independent tribunal was hearing arguments in a legal battle between Google and Facebook and two of the three judges decided to meet privately with a contractor hired by Google to discuss strategy about the case. What would Facebook say once the trial started? They’d bellow “rigged process,” just as every participant except big oil will declare in the case of Energy East.

Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May captured the mood succinctly: “I’m quite shocked and it does take a lot for me to lower my opinion of the NEB enough to be shocked."

The obvious first step is for the Trudeau government to remove the head of the NEB along with the panel members that comprised themselves and reconstitute a panel with some chance at public credibility.

Jacques Gauthier is the panel member who wrote to Jean Charest explicitly asking for backroom discussions on Energy East. He was joined at the meeting by fellow panelist Lyne Mercier as well as NEB chairman and chief executive Peter Watson.

If Trudeau doesn't finally move to clean the rot out of the National Energy Board it's entirely fair to ask what he and his party are getting out of it? How far up does this go?

UPDATE:

Alison from Creekside sent a link to a piece in iPolitics.ca. Trudeau's EnviroMin, Dame Catherine herself, is giving the government's blessing to the Harper/Trudeau NEB.

“We must have confidence in our system, we must have confidence in our institutions, and we must ensure we have decisions that are independent,” McKenna said, adding the Liberal government is committed to reviewing the environmental assessment process rigorously.

Yes, yes, Cathy, true enough, all of it. We must have confidence in our system. We must have confidence in our institutions. It's your bloody job to see that we do - and we don't. We've seen enough of your National Energy Board, enough to shake the confidence of any objective observer.  It's your "system" now and we don't have any confidence in you either. So pull your thumb out, clean up your goddamned National Energy Board and start rebuilding the confidence we are entitled to have in our institutions.