Thank you, Michael.
The CCA believes the Government of Canada should continue its effort to improve administration of federal environmental assessment, recognizing that substantial legislative reform is necessary.
We believe this committee should consider the following interrelated factors: the way in which the environmental assessments are triggered; the entrenchment of duplication, and the lack of reciprocity with and substitution by the processes of other jurisdictions; inherent process uncertainty and issues of timeliness; the wasted resources applied to the assessment of inconsequential projects, or those that have minimal environmental risk.
With regard to triggering, it's important to note that self-assessment remains a key principle of CEAA screenings. The triggering mechanism for environmental assessment remains a fundamental problem with the act. The act is presently triggered by one of four mechanisms, wherein the federal authority is responsible to undertake an environmental assessment if it's the proponent; will transfer land to facilitate its implementation; will provide funding; or issues a permit or authorization pursuant to a variety of legislation under the law list regulations.
The process to determine which federal authorities must undertake an environmental assessment as triggered by these mechanisms results in a gross waste of time and resources and offers no value from an environmental protection perspective. Further, the assessment of projects by different agencies leads to an unnecessary diffusion of responsibility and inconsistency in application of the law.
Thus, the recent amendments making the agency responsible for the coordination of comprehensive studies are excellent. This should be done for screenings as well, in our view, provided that overall, fewer of them are done.
We believe that coupled with centralizing responsibility, a list-based approach to deciding which projects require assessment and at what level--analogous to the approach of international financial institutions and several provinces in Canada--would improve both efficiency and consistency and eliminate the bureaucratic wasteful process.
The second related matter of interest to our members pertains to duplication and the limited ability to recognize reciprocity and substitution between jurisdictions. As an organization, CCA feels it does not make sense for a federal environmental assessment to be triggered if a comparable environmental assessment is being conducted by another jurisdiction; if it is triggered based solely on the issuance of a permit, or the transfer of land or funding to another jurisdiction; if the project is of little environmental consequence and unlikely to result in significant environmental effects; or if it will have no significant transboundary environmental effects.
For example, a simple Fisheries Act authorization for a small component of a project, such as a culvert on a road to a mine, or a federally funded project, such as a highway, that is otherwise being fully assessed by a province should not result in a broadly scoped duplicative federal environmental assessment. There is no value in the federal government duplicating the effort and mandate of other jurisdictions.
CCA members believe a solution to this challenge of duplication would be the development of a national framework for environmental assessment. The federal government needs to work with provinces, territories, and other jurisdictions to ensure equivalency, reciprocity, and substitution, to facilitate it across Canada to minimize duplication. The fundamental objective would be one project, one assessment.
Such a practice would simplify scoping, improve the timeliness of assessments, and permit governments to better employ limited resources where they are needed most. A list-based approach would also ensure that federal environmental assessments, when triggered, are respectful of the existence of other tools for the achievement of sustainable development, including policy, strategic environmental assessment, legislation, guidance, environmental management systems, and codes of practice.
At CCA we remain concerned that the bar for requiring federal environmental assessment is currently very low. We are doing thousands of environmental assessments under CEAA every year, many of which are for projects that are inconsequential or will have minimal environmental effects.
For example, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, in a study entitled “Federal Screenings: An Analysis based on information from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Registry Internet Site”, found that of 2,259 screenings reviewed in 2004, “over 90% dealt with projects that appeared unlikely to cause more than minor adverse environmental effects or pose more than minor environmental risks”.
I would like to make a point that is obvious, yet unrecognized by most. The birth of environmental assessment in the 1960s and 1970s arose from the recognition that society needed to include environmental considerations when planning projects. It was a broad-brush tool, aimed at addressing a significant societal problem. Since that time, society has supplemented this early measure, passing environmental laws and developing environmental standards, codes of practice, and a range of tools like strategic environmental assessment, environmental management systems, environmental protection plans, pollution abatement technology, and environmental guidelines.
Consequently, we now have four decades of experience in managing project-related environmental effects. I would argue that the need for environmental assessment has been largely eclipsed for many of the projects subjected to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Many EAs conducted today under CEAA have become mere checklists for legislative compliance and not true environmental assessments, as originally intended. Not recognizing this is a key contributing factor to the persistent pursuit of unnecessary environmental assessment now entrenched in CEAA.
The parliamentary review should therefore, in our view, consider very carefully the number of current environmental assessments triggered and ensure that the number of projects triggered is reduced to ensure that only aspects not presently dealt with through other statutory or regulatory requirements and not duplicative are in fact assessed. The CCA believes that this will free up federal resources to tackle projects that may have greater environmental consequences or a requirement for unique mitigation.
Michael.