Outgoing Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan is a hard-line opponent of the Canadian government's (previously Kinder Morgan's) Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

"This is a threat to the autonomy of our province," Corrigan said last March. "I think it will inevitably lead to a constitutional crisis."

But after more than 15 years in the mayor's chair, Corrigan was voted out of office earlier this month.

Unfortunate for the Liberal government in Ottawa, the man who beat Corrigan, former firefighter Mike Hurley, is no bigger a fan of pipelines than the predecessor for whom he's taking over.

Hurley doesn't assume power in Burnaby for another week (November 5). But he's already working to disrupt and delay Trans Mountain's plans to expand its tanker facilities located near Burnaby Mountain.

The former firefighter has said he's concerned for the greater risk of a "boil over" at that tanker facility that would come with more heavy crude oil being stored there and flowing to the region's nearby port. According to the Globe and Mail, a boil over—a tanker fire that burns beyond control to spread to neighbouring tanks—has never occurred at the company's Burnaby facility, and it's a classification of accident that remain rare throughout the world.

But that's unlikely to stop opponents of the pipeline-expansion project from latching onto Hurley's words and the authority with which he voices them as a former firefighter.

Hurley even has the city's current fire chief, Joe Robinson, backing his warning. “It doesn’t mean there can’t be," Robinson told the Globe in response to Trans Mountain's claim that a boil-over fire is highly unlikely.

The Trans Mountain project involves twinning an oil pipeline that runs from Edmonton—where it receives diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands—to a port in Burnaby. Upon completion, it would triple the amount of bitumen transported to the Lower Mainland, increasing the number of oil tankers moving through Burrard Inlet from some 60 ships per year to more than 400.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's administration announced that Ottawa would purchase the pipeline from Kinder Morgan Canada, a subsidiary of the Texas-based Kinder Morgan Inc, last May. The deal closed in late-August 2018.

At an August 4 news conference in Duncan, Trudeau defended the $4.5 billion purchase.

“There are people out there who think there is still a choice to be made between what’s good for the environment and what’s good for the economy. I don’t,” Trudeau said, according to Global News.