AWA Letter: Expert Panel Report on Canadian Environmental Assessment Act Review

May 5, 2017

The Honourable Catherine McKenna
Minister of Environment and Climate Change
ec.ministre-minister.ec@canada.ca

Canadian Environmental Assessment Act Review

Dear Minister McKenna,

Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA) would like to acknowledge and thank the Expert Panel for their work on reviewing Canada’s federal assessment processes. We appreciated the opportunity to present and provide input in late 2016, and now we would like to take the opportunity to provide feedback on the final report. In general, AWA believes this report to contain significant recommendations to improve Canada’s assessment processes. Of course, how these recommendations are implemented and carried out in practice will ultimately determine the success of the Panel’s report. AWA supports the Panel’s vision for federal assessments to be transparent, inclusive, informed and meaningful and we would encourage the Government of Canada to keep the Panel’s vision in the forefront as changes to Canada’s assessment processes are made.

1. Purpose: AWA supports the Panel’s recommendation to move Canada towards a sustainability based Impact Assessment (IA), which will seek to ensure that projects provide an overall environmental, social, cultural, health and economic A shift towards federal assessments having sustainability as a core objective would improve the process; clearly listing tradeoffs and determining whether projects provide an overall benefit will help to bring transparency and restore public trust.

2. Multi-Jurisdictional: According to our understanding, the Panel report currently recommends a single assessment when multiple jurisdictions are involved, which will be accomplished via multi-jurisdictional co-operation. This seems appropriate given the vision to move towards a sustainability based assessment. There will be information that will be required from all levels of government in order to achieve this level of assessment. AWA is concerned with the proposal to allow substitution to be available, even if substitution decisions were only made on a case by case basis and based on the condition that the highest standard of IA would apply. It is of our opinion that since the Panel has recommended that only projects, regions, plans or policies which are of federal interest require federal IA, it is only logical that the federal government is involved in the process. We do recognize that the form of “substitution” proposed has a number of stringent requirements and would require ongoing federal involvement. However, since this is so close to the concept of cooperation, substitution is an unnecessary option and would only potentially weaken the assessment process. We agree with the Panel’s opinion that equivalency is not a viable option.

3. Triggers: The Panel recommends the creation of a project list which will trigger the need for federal IA, which would be supplemented with two triggering mechanisms: projects which have the potential to impact current and future generations should undergo IA, as well as provisions for any person or group to request a project to require a federal IA. While we understand that the use of a project list is intended to provide clarity to proponents, AWA is concerned that this may result in some unintended omissions and may not consider the impacts of smaller projects. Projects, regardless of size, have directly or indirectly contributed to the cumulative degradation of the environment. We suggest that an alternative “in unless out” approach is more precautionary and may prevent significant omissions. How the triggering approach for individual projects is implemented in conjunction with the implementation and compliance of regional assessments is critical – see our comments on cumulative effects, below.
4. Cumulative Impacts: AWA is encouraged to see the Panel consider the cumulative impacts that the sum of many projects are having on Canada’s landscape. AWA also supports the Panel’s recommendation of an integrated approach where the use of strategic and regional IAs would guide project assessments. We would like to emphasize the need for the use of a pre-industrial baseline when considering cumulative impacts in regional IAs: current assessments omit the impacts of past anthropogenic projects, creating a problem known as a shifting baseline. In this way, the degradation of the environment by the accumulation of multiple activities on a landscape is never fully captured or is simply ignored.

The Panel report underlines the value of undertaking regional IAs in order to establish thresholds and ensure that limits are placed on the cumulative impacts of projects, whether or not they require a federal IA. Setting regional cumulative effects disturbance thresholds would help to ensure that future development decisions support recovery and habitat requirements for species at risk, which would also help to meet Canada’s international commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity to maintain and restore biodiversity. We emphasize there must be a legislated and regulated requirement for proponents to conform to regional plans, with incentives for proponents to cooperate to achieve objectives and penalties for those refusing to comply. Additionally, regional IAs should have legislated requirements so that if cumulative effects thresholds are exceeded, then the focus will shift to recovery and restoration. This will require inter-jurisdictional cooperation at all levels of government.

The Panel’s recommendation to include strategic IAs as part of the federal assessment process is a positive one. We are especially supportive of the use of strategic assessments in order to help address the issue of climate change by determining a project’s or region’s GHG emissions, the impacts that climate change will have on the landscape on which a project is located, and considering the long term sustainability of a project or region under a changing climate. This will help to ensure that future assessments are fully taking sustainability into consideration. AWA would recommend that strategic assessments be used not only to provide direction on how a project/region will implement certain federal policies and initiatives, but will also be used to determine whether new policies and initiatives achieve net sustainability. For example, a proposal in a Federal budget to boost the economy by widening every road in Canada would have to be assessed and determined whether this will achieve net sustainability. A strategic IA would consider future of transportation, climate change policies, and international agreements and would perhaps recommend that the budget be used to incentivize public transportation initiatives instead.

5. Public Participation and Capacity: AWA would agree with the Panel’s assessment that current opportunities for the public to meaningfully participate are unsatisfactory, with significant frustration shared over a seeming inability to impact an assessment outcome. We agree that the current consultation process is not meaningful, as it only seeks to inform the public. AWA would prefer for consultation to be improved towards proponents collaborating with the public. The limitations in who is allowed to participate in CEAA 2012 have only served to hinder public trust and the public’s ability to participate meaningfully. The ability for the wider Canadian public to meaningfully engage in all environmental assessments necessarily includes increased time windows for public engagement, with earlier engagement opportunities and the ability to understand decision making processes at each step of the process.

In order to meaningfully participate in federal IA, AWA agrees that increased capacity – both government capacity to undertake reviews and increased funding for participants – is necessary. This, coupled with increased time for the public to review and prepare for the engagement processes, will result in better outcomes. AWA has been personally challenged by the short timelines to participate in reviews and limitations on which projects we have been able to participate in. As a provincial conservation organization, we believe that we can provide valuable input to certain projects and regional assessments.

6. Scientific Credibility: AWA is supportive of the following Panel recommendations to increase scientific credibility and transparency in the assessment process:

The Panel recommends that IA legislation require that IA information be easily accessible, and permanently and publicly available. The full assessment, including raw scientific data, must be permanently available to the public to allow for public review and evaluation during and after decision-making.
Impact Assessments would be prepared by an IA authority rather than the current practice where the proponent produces the Environmental Impact Statement
The Panel recommends that IA legislation require that all phases of IA use and integrate the best available scientific information and methods.
The Panel recommends that IA legislation require the development of a central, consolidated and publicly available federal government database to house all baseline and monitoring data collected for IA purposes.

Ensuring that the best available science is used and publicly available will help to improve impact assessments over time. Shifting the duty to complete the impact assessment away from the proponent to the IA authority would help to ensure the impartiality of the report and the credibility of the assessments. As the Panel Report underlines, currently assessments are often biased and results skewed in favors of the proponent. Making information publicly available will also help to build a database upon which regional IAs can be developed and help guide informed decision making.

7. Decision Making: The Panel has made a number of positive recommendations regarding how decisions will be made in a new IA process: decisions are to be evidence-based, influenced by public participation, clearly list criteria made towards making the decision and any tradeoffs, and are informed by the sustainability test. If these recommendations are implemented then they will likely result in increased transparency and public trust in the process.

8. Monitoring, compliance and enforcement: AWA is supportive of the Panel’s recommendations for increased monitoring and enforcements of projects after impacts assessments are completed. If implemented correctly, they could serve to greatly increase transparency, holding proponents to account, and would likely greatly improve assessments in general as the efficacy of mitigation measures is determined.

Thank you for consideration of these comments.

With regards,

ALBERTA WILDERNESS ASSOCIATION

Joanna Skrajny
Conservation Specialist

cc: Johanne Gélinas, Expert Panel Chair, EAreview_Participation@Canada.ca