Enbridge: Community Engagement
Originally published in Enbridge's 2020 Sustainability Report
Ongoing engagement is essential for creating and sustaining long-term value for landowners and communities near our projects and operations, and ensuring we maintain our business. Through dialogue and community participation, we seek to build trust and understanding, and cultivate relationships that enable us to constructively address stakeholder needs.
Our engagement efforts are more important than ever. We want to hear stakeholders’ points of view and use every opportunity we have to explain how we see the energy transition unfolding and what we’re doing to bridge to a safer and cleaner energy future.
We are guided by our Corporate Social Responsibility Policy, which commits us to clear, honest and respectful interactions, and initiatives that we undertake to adhere steadfastly to our values and be customized to local needs. We also engage with Indigenous peoples and groups living near our projects and operations in Canada and the U.S. However, because in both countries Indigenous peoples have distinct rights, we recognize them as being separate from other stakeholders. For more information, please see the Indigenous inclusion chapter of this report.
Regional engagement plans (REPs) are the integration platform for engagement activities in each of our U.S. and Canadian regions, including community engagement, public awareness and safety programs and community investment. The REPs are evergreen documents maintained by Enbridge employees in regional project planning, operations and community engagement roles to help us identify risks and opportunities, and coordinate our actions.
Enbridge’s enterprise-wide public awareness program meets, and often exceeds, regulatory requirements. This communication program is dedicated to informing and educating neighbors, landowners, the digging community (including developers, excavators and farmers), Indigenous groups, municipal and emergency officials, and others about the presence of pipelines and associated facilities in their communities and how to live and work safely around them. To learn more about our program, visit our Public Awareness Program page or visit the Safety page on the Enbridge Gas website for residential customers.
Should stakeholders have questions that aren’t addressed through our regular engagement processes, we have mechanisms in place for documenting, addressing and resolving these items.
Questions raised by communities near our projects or operations have included pipeline safety, routing, site remediation, security, noise and environmental impacts. We offer stakeholders a variety of methods to reach us, including toll-free telephone numbers, in-person meetings, public meetings and tours, and electronic communications and web pages.
Public awareness, through both internal and external evaluation processes driven by regulation, identifies and acts on areas of the program that drive continual program improvement and enhance the safety of the communities in which Enbridge operates. Areas under current review include (but are not limited to) enhancing how we use risk to guide the program, how we deliver our supplemental safety messaging (content and method/ medium) and creating additional public awareness tools for our field personnel.
Our 2020 engagement priorities
While the pandemic prevented us from conducting many of our engagement activities in person, we found different ways to connect with our community stakeholders during the year—pivoting to virtual meetings, virtual open houses and more.
Supporting communities in need was a primary focus this past year. We worked closely with non-profit partners, Indigenous neighbors, and local governments to identify where resources were needed most and collaborated with our Corporate Citizenship team to provide support. See Corporate Citizenship, page 41, to learn more.
During the initial outbreak of COVID-19, Enbridge donated funds as well as safety equipment to help critical organizations continue to operate throughout the pandemic. In Houston, through the Greater Houston Partnership, we donated Tyvek protective suits to the Houston Methodist Hospital to keep doctors, nurses and other staff safe as they treated patients. In Albany, GA, we supplied the Boys and Girls Club of Albany with KN95 masks, and also provided funds for food boxes that were given out to the community. Our partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of Albany has spanned many years, both through Phase I and II of the Sabal Trail Transmission Project, and has continued into operations. We placed Phase II of our project, which consisted of providing incremental capacity through the addition of two compression stations, one in Georgia and one in Florida, into service safely in May 2020, following all COVID-19 safety protocols implemented by both our company and local communities.
