Pipelines in the “Public Interest”? The Jurisdictional Work of a Concept in Canadian Pipeline Assessment

Abstract

This paper contributes to research on the means by which the Canadian state authorises, enables, and secures new major petroleum pipelines. While disruptions to pipeline construction are now increasingly common, state and industry alike have continued to finance and approve new projects, even despite serious and ongoing concerns about impacts on ecologies and Indigenous jurisdiction. The paper focuses on one under‐researched mechanism of state authorisation: federal impact assessments for new oil and gas pipeline projects, undertaken by the National Energy Board (NEB), Canada’s now former energy regulator, which operated between 1959 and 2019. The NEB’s mandate was to deem, via impact assessment, whether a new project would be in the “public interest”. I argue public interest is an effective legal‐political mechanism for securing and obscuring the state’s claim to jurisdiction, the traction of which lies partly in an underlying colonial scalar logic and imaginary.