Woodfibre LNG has announced that the floatel has berthed at the Project site in compliance with the Order issued on Monday, June 17, by the BC Environmental Assessment Office.
“The company had complied with the Order and is pleased to be able to move forward with utilizing the MV Isabelle X to provide comfortable at-site accommodation for our valued workforce while meeting all requirements of our Environmental Assessment Certificate in relation to worker access to the community of Squamish,” said Christine Kennedy, President, Woodfibre LNG.
The floatel is the workforce accommodation mandated in provincial and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) regulatory approvals, following an extensive community engagement process that took place between 2019 and 2023. The company said using a floatel is a community-driven solution that meets the district’s and the community’s requests to house non-local workers outside of the community of Squamish.
The floatel represents an investment of $100 million in providing quality accommodation for workers including on-board dining, recreation and medical services, which ensures that the community is strained by an influx of non-local skilled workers helping to build the Woodfibre LNG facility.
“We are particularly proud to see the floatel berthed at site on National Indigenous Peoples Day, and to have the extensive work of our Gender Safety Advisory Committee able to be implemented through our first of its kind Gender and Cultural Safety Management Plan. The floatel represents our commitment to advancing lasting economic benefits through the Woodfibre LNG project” added Kennedy.
Jil says
One common sense foot forward and one step back for unreasonable protests.
Melissa DeWolf says
Personally, I would absolutely love to invite the workers to our community…I hope that they will have access to come to town and partake in our many forms of recreation, dining and peruse our diverse retail establishments.
This is happening.
Let’s welcome the workers, let’s welcome these people who are doing their jobs, far away from home.
N_Dj says
Progressive but incompetent members of the Squamish City Council, please take a note:
The $100 million the Woodfibre LNG will pay the boat, that will leave when the project is done, if you had any brain and common sense, could have been invested in the City/community to build you a great hotel, that would stay as a gift at the end of the project…
But hey, you are more interested in “Gender and Cultural Safety Management Plan”, and you must be very proud that this is “first of its kind”…
Jon Moats says
How is the ship being powered while anchored?
Offshore electricity or it’s own bunker fuel?
They’ve banned the cruise ships from running generators while docked in port now, due to the fact they spew emissions like nobody’s business.
Look it up!
Bill Sykes says
If you “look it up” you will see that the Floatel has onshore electrical power from BC Hydro.
It also has six industrial sized electric heat pumps, the first time this has been used for this purpose on a vessel of this nature.
When the vessel is connected to shore power it will not use diesel boilers.
Bob Malcolm says
All the dithering and irrelevant roadblocks put up by council has made for a tarnished image of Squamish in the eyes that matter. Council should be ashamed of their partisan behavior. Lets hope we all remember this debacle when the next election comes up.
Will they pull the same stuff with the Fortis camp on the Mamquam? At least as many will be housed there and in much closer proximity to the sensitive members of our community.
Aaron says
I’m glad to see Squamish council is finally getting some adult supervision from the Province.
At council meetings, Members of Squamish council appeared to be completely clueless as to the limits of their authority and jurisdiction and the purpose and scope of their meetings – seemingly trying to conduct their own duplicate project safety and environmental assessments YEARS after these were completed at the federal level and they further claimed to be concerned about the impact of Woodfibre workers on the town and ‘gender safety’ – But instead they blocked the very thing that that would keep the workers out of town- the floatel!
This I think clearly indicates they were simply acting in bad faith the whole time and were not the least bit concerned about impacts on the town or some laughable, invented-yesterday-on- Tik-Tok-boiler plate- woke-nonsense, indefinable pseudo-concept like ‘gender safety’.
In fact, all of these objections were just disingenuous excuses to delay the LNG project.
If Council actually cared about anything other than their own egos and virtue signalling to their recently arrived ‘trust fund activist’ buddies, they would have at least attempted to derive some benefit from the LNG for the town and people of Squamish instead of engaging in pointless grandstanding of and ultimately making utter clowns of themselves.