Some shale gas opponents concerned public survey is biased

Some residents of Albert County, which is home to one of the province's identified shale gas deposits, say they found the province's survey on its fracking moratorium to be skewed. I thought it was vague, purposely created. Often when you get a survey from the government it seems fairly skewed to wanting to get some answers. And they're not alone. The Conservation Council of New Brunswick agrees. The way things were worded was, in my opinion, very biased towards natural gas development and trying to get people to lead in that direction. So to me, the survey is not an unbiased survey, and I would have some questions about the results of the survey. The 16 survey questions asked respondents for demographic information about their awareness of the moratorium and their opinion on natural gas development in the province. For Beverly Gingras, the terminology was a red flag. They really talk about natural gas development, but they don't talk about fracking. And the moratorium was really talking about fracking. And natural gas sounds like a, it sounds like kind of a benevolent term, right? Like it's natural. People don't always equate it to fracked gas, to fracked shale gas. Gingras has written to Premier Susan Holt to ask for an independent review of the moratorium before the government reaches a decision. That's one of the things that I've been asking for is to have some third party review and some transparency in terms of what type of data they're collecting, who's collecting this data, what they're going to do it, how are these results are going to be interpreted. how is the public going to see the results is the public going to have a chance to engage in the results before decisions are made like the government has given themselves a very short timeline to get this done in an emailed statement the province said the survey is one part of a broader review process that also includes engagement with First Nations stakeholders and communities that could be affected Holt said in August that the province will wrap up its review in January. She also said the department would provide monthly updates on the review, but that has yet to happen.