Well, there’s a fairly regulatory-intensive announcement by the federal government, and tragically news articles are peppered with terms, phrases, and nuances that frankly will go over the ordinary persons head. Most people don’t understand our environmental regulatory system and lobby groups take advantage of that by making accusations that are so lacking in facts or logic that they’d make baby seals cry.
Anyways, luckily I have knowledge of the environmental regulatory system and can break down some of the terms and phrases to make them more understandable (with the help of my notes from ENV E 302 on Environmental Impact Assessments, from the last year it was taught as a joint ENVE-MINE class. Credit to Dr. Zaher Hashisho for the notes.). For reference, here’s an article from Postmedia News (listed on the Montreal Gazette).
The first thing that people need to understand is that not all projects need a Federal environmental assessment (FEA), and that is due to the Constitutional separation of powers. For the FEA, the PEAT model is followed:
Project
Exclusion List
Authority
Trigger
Project is “an undertaking related to a physical work” according to my notes, and including construction, operation, decommissioning, modification, or something is listed on the Schedule to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEA Act). Exclusion List refers to the Exclusion List Regulation, a regulation under the CEA Act. Anything listed under the ELR is not a project and therefore does not need an FEA.
Authority means it has to involve a federal Minister of the Crown, an agency or body of the federal government, a department or departmental corporation (schedules A&B of the FAA). Finally is the trigger. A trigger means the federal government is giving money (eg- tax break on that project), the company needs a permit (Fisheries, Navigable Waters, ect), the project is taking place on Federal Crown Land, or the federal government is the proponent of the project (this does not mean promoting, proponent has a very specific meaning referring to the organization, usually a corporation, who is financially backing the project and who will directly benefit).
Ok, now to the article. First thing, the federal government will allow a provincial assessment to substitute for a FEA if it meets the CEA Act. Most people probably don’t know that right now Federal-Provincial joint assessment are currently possible and are already done. This just takes the next logical step by saying that if a provincial assessment meets the CEA Act there doesn’t need to be a duplicate, nor should there be. Doing an identical assessment should give an identical result, so there’s no point (except to unnecessarily delay a proceeding).
Secondly, provincial regulations will be equivalent to the Fisheries Act. People know that I am not a fan of DFO, but legally this is not on good ground. Fisheries are a Federal head of power under the Constitution, and the Federal government cannot unilaterally transfer that to the provinces (they’d have to amend the Constitution as was done with the Natural Resources Transfer Act back when Westminster had to amend our Constitution). However, the ability to give the NEB and the CNSC the ability to grant approvals under the Fisheries Act is legitimate as the government can just designate them Fisheries Officers under the Fisheries Act.
The other big one is consolidating reviews. This will be contentious, but the reason is because nobody listens to reason anymore: we don’t need 40 different departments with 40 different FEA review processes. FEA’s are done to ensure that we are achieving the 3-fold balance between economics, social issues (including employment poverty, issues with “boom towns”, etc), and the environment. Yes, people probably don’t actually know that an EIA is suppose to be looking at all 3 of those, not just the environment. And this is an upgrade from the cost-benefit analysis that was done before that (which looked mostly at economics, as it’s hard to put costs and benefits in dollar amounts on social issues and the environment).
The reason we don’t need 40 is that there is no need. Once we have done a FEA, there doesn’t need to be another one. we live in a society that seems to think that we have the right to do “it” (replace it with whatever you feel like) as many times as we like until we get the result we like. That’s not how real life works or should work. The legal system has a court of last resort (the Supreme Court) so that there’s a resolution that can’t be appealed so that it’s resolved.
The people who are interested in the multiple processes don’t seem to be so interested in making sure of the 3-fold balance as dragging out processes to make them impossible for proponents to proceed. That’s not the point of the FEA process. The point is to make sure that any significant impacts are mitigated to reasonable and acceptable levels. Now for something people probably already know: FEA’s are almost never rejected. It’s bad press for a company. The other reason is that all the major issues are commonly worked out between the company and the regulators before the formal process even starts. When you’re doing a formal FEA, you already know the major impacts and you’ve already mitigated to regulatory standards or best practice.
Unfortunately, mob mentality can take over, as in the case of the Keystone XL Pipeline (that aquifer in Nebraska? There’s already pipelines going through it, including the older Keystone Pipeline).
So, those are some of the facts that people could probably use in understanding the issue. But of course, facts aren’t as fun and accusing the other side of being environmental pariah’s/extreme tree huggers, so as usual they’ll get buried.