Evidence of meeting #12 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was ceaa.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Prof. Meinhard Doelle
Right. I don't know enough about it. It doesn't strike me as a high priority, but I'd want to know a bit more about it.
If the general point is that we are spending more time and resources on smaller projects, then we should be relative to the amount of effort we're putting into larger projects. There is a case to be made for that, and I'm all for spending the resources we have wisely.
My main point was that we should not necessarily look at this as all or nothing. There are ways of doing effective screenings without putting a lot of time and money into them.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Mark Warawa
Thank you.
The time has expired.
You have the last six minutes, Ms. Duncan.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to begin with Ms. Malone. You've mentioned, as others have, that there is duplication in the system. Has your group ever done a review of the various legislation at the different levels of government to see where the actual duplication is?
Vice-President, Operations, Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors
I guess from the perspective of our members we have done that through the four western provinces. There is considerable duplication, but it's also just a lack of harmonization.
A very simple example of that is that each western province requires each of our crew members to have a different first aid ticket, so our guys each have four first aid tickets. It's just little things like that, all the way up to weight restrictions on our equipment when we move across border, how the equipment is configured in terms of the number of axles and that sort of thing. For our immediate purposes, we encounter that every time we cross a provincial border.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
That's helpful. No one has actually ever given us that detail.
Now, you're not required to do this, but would you be willing to table...with the committee so they could actually see where the duplication is occurring?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Mark Warawa
Order: whenever a request like this is made, it's strictly voluntary.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Yes, that's what I was trying to say, Mr. Chair, that she's not required to do it.
You're not required to do it, but you're the first person who has actually given us examples of this. It's there if you want--or to provide more examples.
Vice-President, Operations, Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors
We could certainly look at putting something together.
Vice-President, Operations, Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors
It probably wouldn't be directly relevant to environmental assessment, though.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
But that's what we need—something directly relevant to environmental assessment.
Vice-President, Operations, Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors
No, we wouldn't have that, because we're contractors. The operating companies would be purchasing the leased land, doing assessments of what is there, what needs to be preserved, what needs to be watched and captured, that sort of thing. When we arrive with our equipment on site and have pre-job meetings, we are told--
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
So you are not talking about something directly related to environmental assessment. Okay. That's what we're interested in.
Vice-President, Operations, Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors
We see it in our day-to-day operations, but I'm sure the operators would know about the environmental assessment stuff.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Thank you, Ms. Malone.
Professor Doelle, you talked a lot about strategic environmental assessment. You talked about having it formally recognized. Would you like to see it have a statutory basis?
Prof. Meinhard Doelle
Yes, I would. I think if we're going to start learning about how strategic environmental assessments can help us at the project level, we have to bring it into the legislation. I say that in part because of my experience in Nova Scotia, where we did a strategic environmental assessment of tidal energy. It was an ad hoc process and that made it much more difficult to feed into project decisions afterwards. Part of the benefit of doing it was lost because it wasn't done under a legislative process.
Liberal
Prof. Meinhard Doelle
Ideally, you do it wherever you are trying to conserve policies, plans, and programs. In some cases, the ideal scenario would be a joint strategic environmental assessment involving multiple jurisdictions. In other cases, if there is exclusive federal jurisdiction over an issue, then it makes sense to do it “federal only”. If there's exclusive provincial jurisdiction, it makes sense to do it at the provincial level only.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
You talked about including how the process is initiated. If strategic environmental assessments were included in the legislation, do you have ideas about how the process should be initiated?
Prof. Meinhard Doelle
First, if there is a policy gap identified in a project assessment, I think there should be an opportunity to recommend in the final project report, the EA report, that a strategic environmental assessment be done. We should think about a mechanism to get from that recommendation to actually making decisions about whether to initiate this.
Second, whenever you get a new type of project, there should be an automatic consideration of whether there should be a strategic environmental assessment done. The first time we had an LNG facility proposed in Canada, someone should have thought about whether this should warrant a strategic environmental assessment. There's a tremendous amount of benefit to be gained for future project assessments in such cases.
There are other ideas, but those are two key ones.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Can you give us a few more of those ideas? I think it's important to have some of these in the final report. What is your wish list?
Prof. Meinhard Doelle
The wish list would also include looking at whether there are certain policies that are out of date and should be reviewed. There ought to be a process that recognizes major changes that would require a strategic environmental assessment.
You can do a strategic environmental assessment on a regional basis. If there is all of a sudden a lot of development in an area, that may warrant doing a strategic environmental assessment on a regional basis. If all of a sudden there is all kinds of economic activity in one area and you're concerned about competing uses, this could also trigger the need for a strategic environmental assessment.
My basic suggestion is that it should be discretionary in the first instance. You identify the opportunity and then you make someone responsible for considering whether a strategic environmental assessment is appropriate. If it is, then you go ahead with it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Mark Warawa
Unfortunately, time has expired. Thank you.
This ends today's study, a review of CEAA. My thanks to the witnesses for being with us.
Ms. Malone and Professor Doelle, we have much appreciated your participation.
We will now move to dealing with a motion. We had a notice of motion from Ms. Leslie.
Ms. Leslie, the floor is yours.
NDP
Megan Leslie NDP Halifax, NS
Thank you.
I would like to move the following motion, and I think everybody--
