Former premier Stephen Kakfwi is candid when he grades the record of his Northwest Territories on industry. “We kind of fumbled it,” he says in reviewing the Mackenzie Gas Project’s slide into a purgatory of delayed regulatory decisions.

Kakfwi gets no quarrel from Kevin Meyers, president of Mackenzie project partner ConocoPhillips Canada. “It is hard to be too positive about that regulatory process. It is probably not best in class by a far means,” Meyers says.

The fate of Canada’s northern pipeline, now nearly a decade old and still as much as two years away from approval, has caught international industry eyes as an example of problems that other, bigger developments need to avoid. A plea for adoption of an efficient process tops the Denali project’s agenda as regulatory review begins on Canadian parts of its Alaska natural gas pipeline plan.

The international project’s sponsors, Alaskan subsidiaries of global giants ConocoPhillips Co. and BP plc, prodded Canadian authorities into paying attention by filing an outline of their plans with the National Energy Board. The document expresses hope that the early notice will encourage, prior to formal construction applications, creation of a path through complicated and overlapping federal, aboriginal, Yukon, British Columbia and Alberta regimes for assessing environmental and socio-economic effects of northern industrial developments.

“It would be extremely beneficial if available provisions in relevant statutes and inter-jurisdictional agreements were used to facilitate co-ordination among the bodies responsible,” the NEB filing says. Denali representatives have also made their case in discussions with the board and other agencies involved at all levels, the document discloses.

The Alaska partners politely avoid referring to the $16-billion Mackenzie project by name. But ConocoPhillips is all too familiar through its Canadian branch with the Mackenzie project’s regulatory problem, which is that the NEB is far from the only agency involved. A parallel environmental and socio-economic Joint Review Panel – representing multiple federal, territorial and aboriginal authorities – has delayed its report until at least late 2009 after its hearings dragged on for months longer than planned. The NEB cannot even schedule the last rounds of its review – hearings for final arguments, then a decision – until the panel turns in its findings, including recommendations for approval conditions.

Canada’s glacial pace of responding to big projects is a priority issue in Ottawa, says national Environment Minister Jim Prentice, chief of the Conservative cabinet’s northern development committee. “We’re really wrestling with this in the federal government,” he said in an Alberta Oil interview. The Mackenzie gas holdup is a wake-up call. “It really focused a lot of discussion.”

The main action to date has been creation of a new agency in Ottawa, called the Major Projects Management Office, with a mandate to co-ordinate national regulatory reviews. The Denali partnership hopes to make use of the fledgling system. “We have requested that a co-ordinated ‘single-window’ office approach be adopted – such as, for example, the major projects office – for our interfacing with these [government] bodies,” the NEB filing says.

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