Testing the Jurisdictional Waters: The Provincial Regulation of Interprovincial Pipelines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of recent efforts by various provinces, but especially British Columbia, this article considers the constitutionality of provincial and municipal assertions of regulatory authority over interprovincial pipelines otherwise regulated by the National Energy Board on the authority of the federal government pursuant to subparagraph 92(10)(a) of the Constitution Act, 1867. The article begins by setting out some of these provincial efforts and then provides a primer on the applicable legal doctrines and principles, namely federal paramountcy, interjurisdictional immunity, and co-operative federalism. It then identifies and summarizes the most important recent administrative and judicial decisions to consider the constitutionality of provincial and municipal regulation in the interprovincial pipeline context. As will be seen, although some uncertainty remains, when viewed in aggregate these decisions and judgments shed considerable light on the contours of provincial and municipal authority over such pipelines. The next part of the paper frames the analysis that is likely to be applied to British Columbia’s most recent and ambitious efforts to enact spill response and recovery legislation that would apply to interprovincial pipelines, including the contentious Trans Mountain expansion pipeline project approved by the federal government in 2016. The article concludes with some observations about Canada’s current pipeline debate and environmental law and policy more generally.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".