Buoyed by the success of Indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a coalition of Canadian First Nation chiefs have launched legal action against the Trudeau government for its recent approval of the Enbridge Line 3 expansion.

Derek Nepinak, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, wrote on Facebook Wednesday that the group’s legal team filed an appeal in federal court challenging the approval, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced late last month in tandem with the expansion of Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.

Condemnation of both projects was swift, with First Nations vowing to fight back. “Just as Indigenous Peoples are showing unwavering strength down at Standing Rock, our peoples are not afraid and are ready to do what needs to be done to stop the pipelines and protect our water and our next generations,” Nepinak said at the time.

“If not stopped, the approval of the Calgary-based Enbridge Line 3 pipeline would mean the building of 1,600 kilometres of new pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, which is situated on the western tip of Lake Superior,” noted the Council of Canadians’ Brent Patterson on Thursday.

Whereas the original 390,000 barrel per day pipeline “would be decommissioned and left underground,” Patterson explained, the new expansion could soon carry “760,000 barrels of diluted bitumen per day and would have the capacity to do so for the next 50-60 years.” Enbridge has even admitted that the pipeline “would mean 19 to 26 megatonnes of upstream greenhouse gas emissions each year.”

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