Frustrated groups demand deadline on Mackenzie pipeline report

Two organizations that helped created a panel to review the proposed Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline are frustrated with how long that panel is taking to prepare its report and demanding a date for the report's release.

It has been more than one year since the Joint Review Panel for the Mackenzie Gas Project, which is evaluating the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the proposed gas pipeline, held its last round of public hearings in November 2007.

The panel has never specified when its report and recommendations would be ready, other than to say it will be finished sometime in 2009.

"When you listen to some people in the streets, they're disappointed in how long it's taking," said Frank Pokiak, chairman of the Inuvialuit Game Council in the territory's Mackenzie Delta region, where the pipeline route would begin.

The game council, along with the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board, is asking the panel to provide a specific date when its report will be delivered.

In a letter sent to panel chairman Robert Hornal last week, both groups said the public deserves "some sense of when the panel's final report will be completed."

They have given the panel until Dec. 12 to reply.

"We thought they were accountable to the partners, but as things progress, you know, it's sort of, 'When the job is done, then it'll be released'." Pokiak said Monday.

A consortium of companies, led by Imperial Oil, wants to build the 1,200-kilometre pipeline through the Northwest Territories to the Alberta border, where natural gas would connect to existing pipelines and flow to southern markets.

In 2004, the Inuvialuit Game Council and the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board agreed with the federal environment minister to create the joint review panel.

The panel is an independent body, mandated to examine "the potential impacts of the project on the environment and lives of the people in the project area," according to its website.

"All we're asking for is where are they, and I'd like to know when the date that they're going to be finished this report," said Rick Edjericon, chairman of the impact review board.

"I'm hoping that … they'll give me some kind of answer by Dec. 12."

A spokesperson for the panel told CBC News that the letter by Pokiak and Edjericon will be considered later this week, when the panel's seven members next meet.