The International Longshore & Warehouse Union Canada has stepped into the prolonged saga over the controversial proposal of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority (VFPA) to build a new container terminal at Deltaport to meet anticipated future demand from Asia. Citing environmental issues and “ballooning costs,” the ILWU sent an open letter to the federal government, declaring that “RBT2 should be rejected.”

The letter was in reaction to the news on  January 23 that Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault had informed the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority (VFPA) that information it had provided satisfied a request for details regarding potential effects of the proposed Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project on fish and fish habitat, salinity and Indigenous people. The VFPA subsequently noted that the project would now be able to move to the final stage of the federal environmental assessment process.

In the letter dated February 9, the ILWU congratulated the government for hosting “the successful COP15” summit in Vancouver and for other recent achievements, but it regretted that the government is, at the same time, “deliberating the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s controversial Roberts Bank Terminal 2 new island mega-project proposal that in many ways flies in the face of these landmark achievements and goals.”

RBT2 plans involve construction of an artificial island in what the ILWU refers to as the “ecologically sensitive” Salish Sea. The union letter notes that, in 2018, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) “characterized the environmental impacts of RBT2 as permanent, irreversible and continuous.”

And more recently, in October 2022, the ECCC reiterated that despite the port’s attempt at mitigation, “the changes predicted as a result of the project would likely constitute an unmitigable species-level risk to Western Sandpipers and shorebirds more generally.”

Other significant concerns raised by the ILWU included “sliding timelines and ballooning costs,” the proposed level of automation and “subsequent job losses” and “the borrowing of huge amounts of capital by the port authority … which it is currently not permitted to do.”

The ILWU acknowledged that “Canada’s West Coast will eventually need additional marine container terminal capacity,” and recommended private-sector terminal alternatives, referring in particular to the GCT Global Container Terminals Deltaport Berth 4 project and the DP World new terminal proposed expansion with the Port of Prince Rupert.

(Photo VFPA of Roberts Bank marine facilities)