VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Ottawa announced on Thursday that it will intervene in the constitutional reference case filed by the government of British Columbia under the British Columbia Constitutional Questions Act.

“We are confident in Parliament’s jurisdiction and will intervene on the question in order to defend our clear jurisdiction over interprovincial pipelines,” Justice Minister and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould said in a statement on Thursday.

The minority provincial government of British Columbia has brought a lawsuit seeking declaratory confirmation of the province's constitutional rights to defend against the risks of a bitumen spill on its coastline. The Western Canadian coastline is a pristine environment that opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Canada Expansion pipeline want to defend at all costs, but tidewater is also the gateway to developing new markets for Canadian bitumen, as its biggest consumer, the US, is fast becoming the world’s leading crude producer.

The $7.4-billion project, which involves twinning the existing 1 150 km pipeline from near Edmonton to Burnaby, would triple its capacity to carry 890 000 bbl/d of oil and could create up to 15 000 jobs. The expansion would see three times more bitumen moved daily to the British Columbia coast and a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic.

The province wants to defer to the courts to affirm whether it has a right to protect its coast from increased oil shipments that the twinning of the pipeline would bring.

Ottawa in November 2016 approved the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, followed soon after by the British Columbia Liberal government signing off on the pipeline's environmental approval early in 2017.

However, things changed with a 2017 provincial election failing to deliver a majority mandate in British Columbia, giving underdogs the New Democratic Party and the British Columbia Greens the opportunity to form a minority government, that has since opposed the project at every turn, shifting the goal posts further and denting investor confidence.