Last August, the Trudeau-led federal government in Canada kicked off a wide-ranging review of the federal environmental assessment process for resource projects by appointing a four-person panel to carry out and deliver a final report to federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna.
The idea behind the panel was the new government’s contention that the previous Conservative government’s move under its Canadian Environmental Assessment Act of 2012 to streamline environmental permitting by eliminating the apparent duplication of effort by provincial and federal regulators had gone too far, and it was time to “restore public trust and confidence” in the country’s environmental and regulatory processes.
The panel — named the “Expert Panel for the Review of Environmental Assessment Processes” and comprised of chair Johanne Gélinas and members Doug Horswill, Rod Northey and Renée Pelletier — delivered its report entitled “Building common ground: A new vision for impact assessment in Canada” in April, and a period for commenting closed in May.
Minister McKenna is still considering the report and may make her official comment in June, though any more substantive moves to change legislation won’t be signalled until later in the year.
The report’s sweeping recommendations, if implemented by the federal government, could severely inhibit resource projects from being developed in Canada, and force Canada’s resources industry to seek out projects in more welcoming jurisdictions around the globe.
In effect, the environment would be protected because no one would want to build a new mine or energy project in Canada.
Many of today’s political leaders in Canada are too young to have participated in crafting some of the terrible public policies implemented by federal and provincial governments of all political stripes in decades past (perhaps best epitomized by the New Democratic Party’s rule in B.C. in the early 1990s, which devastated mining in the province), and may be susceptible to passing new environmental laws that superficially sound good but have dire consequences on the health of the resource sector.
Arguably the panel’s worst recommendation is that federal environmental assessments swell exponentially to include all possible effects of a proposed mine or energy project. The report states “assessment processes must move beyond the biophysical environment to encompass all impacts likely to result from a project,” and a project should only be approved “based on its contribution to sustainability,” with sustainability having “five pillars … of environment, economy, social, cultural and health.”
The panel wants to give environmental assessments the new name “impact assessments” to reflect what would be their wider scope.
The panel then wants the federal government to set up a “quasi-judicial tribunal empowered to undertake a full range of facilitation and dispute-resolution processes” that would effectively compete as a regulator with the National Energy Board, which deals with such issues in the oil and gas sector. The new tribunal’s decisions would also be appealable to the federal cabinet, turning every decision into a politicized one.
Effectively ignoring that resource development is a provincial jurisdiction, the panel also recommends the federal government take a much more dominant role in environmental assessments and “avoid bias” (presumably towards evil industry) by carrying out more of the environmental baseline work that companies do themselves and pass on to regulators for approval.
At the same time, the panel wants to remove hard deadlines for the government to render decisions on environmental assessments, and make the approval process more inclusive with consensus being the overriding goal in all decisions, even though many radical environmental groups are opposed to all resource development and there is no consensus to be had.
With the federal government’s limited resources and motivation to carry out environmental studies, it’s all a recipe for adding substantially to already long and cumbersome permitting processes for new resource projects in Canada.
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Doug Horswill wrote the story called The Sullivan Legacy for the Northern Miner when the Sullivan Mine closed. No one else has come close to describing the positive benefit of mining on provincial economics and Federal economics than Doug Horswill. The Mining industry collectively refuses to put its best foot forward and is suffering this and many other political reviews as a consequence. If you add up all the mining land in BC under positive reclamation it totals 0.07 percent (7/10,000) of the province. If you do the same for Athabasca oil sands after 40 years of mining, it is the same, and it will all be reclaimed. The footprint of the famous Stillwater Mine is one square mile. For some reason unknown to me, the mining industry while an easy target for Environmental Lobby Groups and politicians, absolutely refuses to defend itself against libel and slander by publishing creative proactive articles about the industry. Doug Horswill is the only one who has ever taken the initiative to do so. I wish him luck.