Barry Rothfuss speaking at a  rally against the proposed gas plant on Rte. 940 in May

The executive director of the Atlantic Wildlife Institute is renewing his call for federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin to order a comprehensive review of the proposed 500 MW gas/diesel plant near Centre Village.

“We’re asking her to do her job,” Barry Rothfuss said Thursday during a telephone interview.

“Right now, we have, in my view, an illegal environmental assessment taking place in the province of New Brunswick,” he added.

“The province does not have any jurisdiction in transboundary issues like this. It is purely federal jurisdiction here,” said Rothfuss who also speaks for the Protect the Chignecto Isthmus Coalition that includes more than two-dozen organizations opposed to the gas plant.

In September 2025, the federal Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC) concluded that no further review of the project was needed even though the agency had received 270 public comments raising concerns about the gas plant’s potential effects on wildlife, human health and the environment.

Health effects

Rothfuss says the IAAC decision came before PROENERGY, the American company that would build and operate the plant, released a health study showing that emissions from the gas plant would directly affect Amherst and the areas around it in Cumberland County.

He points to a table showing levels of nitrogen dioxide that are nearly three times higher than federal air quality standards and levels of fine particulate matter or microscopic soot particles that also exceed federal standards.

Federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin. Photo: House of Commons

According to Health Canada, long-term exposure to low levels of nitrogen dioxide can increase the risks for breathing problems that include coughing and wheezing while worsening the effects of asthma, airborne allergies and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Health Canada also warns that fine particulate matter is most dangerous for children with asthma, older adults or people with underlying breathing or heart problems.

“These are their own figures I’m referring to,” Rothfuss says about the health study that PROENERGY commissioned.

He adds that the current environmental impact assessment (EIA) that New Brunswick is conducting stops at the provincial border.

“Only the federal government has the authority to deal with this from both sides of the border and so it’s critical to protect people’s welfare by making sure that the system represents the interests of the communities on either side.”

Water dangers

Rothfuss says PROENERGY’s extraction of water from a wellfield that may be shared between the provinces could also cause problems in Amherst where the town has spent millions upgrading its water systems since 2018.

“Yes, they’re going down below the actual wellfield and pulling the brackish water from beneath it, but that creates a lot of concerns in dealing with contamination and other things into the well table,” Rothfuss says.

“On top of that, they’re pulling out the brackish water and then treating it through a reverse osmosis system once they get it out of the ground.”

Last month, NB Power Vice President Brad Coady told Tantramar council that PROENERGY is now planning to truck the wastewater from the site, possibly to a disposal facility in Halifax.

“This is a very dangerous contaminant byproduct that is going to be produced on virtually a daily basis,” Rothfuss says.

“It means that these contaminant trucks are going to be moving out of the gas plant and down our road systems and potentially into Nova Scotia road systems as well and that creates an unprecedented type of hazard to our community,” he adds.

“It’s not only that the material could potentially spill,” he says, “but you’re also going to have heavy truck movement continuously through the area and it’s going to wear on our roads.”

Indigenous issues

In addition to potential health and water effects in Nova Scotia, Rothfuss points to the lack of consultation with Indigenous communities.

Liberal MP and cabinet minister Dominic LeBlanc

“We are impacting Mi’kmaq territorial rights on the Nova Scotia side of the border,” he says. “They have the same rights on that side of the border as we have on this side of the border and both communities have to be brought to the table here. In that particular sense, this is clearly not a one-province issue, it’s a transboundary issue.”

On August 10th, Rothfuss e-mailed a detailed letter calling on Beauséjour’s member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc to review the evidence and co-ordinate with the federal environment minister to order a comprehensive review of the gas plant project.

The letter suggests that if the federal government fails to exercise its constitutional obligations to review transboundary health and environmental issues as well as its duty to consult Indigenous communities, Protect the Chignecto Isthmus Coalition could take the matter to the Federal Court of Canada for judicial review.

“In this particular instance, their legal responsibility is clear,” Rothfuss says. “This is their jurisdiction, and they’re choosing to ignore it, they’re choosing to turn a blind eye.”

Federal reaction

Samantha Bayard, a spokesperson for for federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin responded to a Warktimes e-mail seeking the minister’s comments saying the request “is best suited to our colleagues at Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC).”

Anna Pittas, a media relations officer with IAAC wrote that “federal impact assessments are limited to major projects that are likely to have adverse effects in federal jurisdiction as defined in the Impact Assessment Act.”

She added that the IAAC’s assessment last year concluded that no further assessment was needed and the effects of the project within federal jurisdiction “would be limited or addressed through existing federal and provincial legislative and regulatory frameworks.”

She also sent a link to the IAAC decision last September.

Gabriel Brunet, senior communications advisor to Beauséjour MP Dominic LeBlanc said Chris Zhou, director of communications for Environment Minister Dabrusin would respond to Warktimes’s request for comment.

Zhou e-mailed to say that the comment from the IAAC (see above) would be the response.

To read a CHMA report on this story, click here.