Enbridge to pay Bad River band $5.1M in Line 5 profits, move pipeline by 2026: judge

Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. must pay an Indigenous band in Wisconsin more than US $5 million in Line 5 profits and relocate the controversial cross-border pipeline within the next three years, a U.S. judge says.

Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. must pay an Indigenous band in Wisconsin more than US $5 million in Line 5 profits and relocate the controversial cross-border pipeline within the next three years, a U.S. judge says.

A rupture on territory that belongs to the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa would constitute a clear public nuisance under federal law, district court Judge William Conley said in a decision late Friday.

But while the order affirms that Enbridge has been trespassing on Bad River land since 2013, when certain permits for the 70-year-old pipeline were allowed to lapse, it stops short of causing "economic havoc" with an immediate shutdown.

"The use of trespass on a few parcels to drive the effective closure of all of Line 5 has always been about a tail wagging a much larger dog," Conley writes in his opinion.

In other words, there are "much larger public policy issues" surrounding cross-border pipelines like Line 5 that the band's arguments, while valid, lack the power to overcome, he said.

Those issues "involve not only the sovereign rights of the band, but the rights of multiple states and international relations between the United States and Canada."

Enbridge has already agreed to reroute the line, an essential energy conduit for much of the U.S. Midwest as well as Ontario and Quebec. But Conley wants that project completed more quickly than currently planned.