Thank you.
Chairperson, committee members, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity to present this brief on behalf of the Province of Saskatchewan.
My name is Mark Wittrup, and I'm the assistant deputy minister, environmental protection and audit. I bring over 25 years of environmental assessment experience, using both the federal and provincial processes, from an industry and government perspective.
With me today is Dr. Tareq Al-Zabet, director, environmental assessment, who brings considerable environmental and resource management experience as well.
In the interest of time, my comments will be brief, highlighting important areas of our more detailed submission.
In Saskatchewan, environmental assessment is only used for projects that pose a high risk to the environment or public safety. We don't use lists of projects; rather, we have a rigorous process to determine whether a project qualifies as a development under the act, and therefore requires a full environmental assessment.
For those projects and activities that do not require an environmental assessment, the normal licensing and permitting processes, and ongoing monitoring and inspection, ensure that they will proceed in a manner protective of the environment.
Under this regime, a responsible proponent can receive the provincial environmental assessment approval in less than a year, allowing the proponent to proceed to licensing, which they can then stage to maximize project efficiency.
Saskatchewan has been an active participant in national discussions on the environmental assessment process. Fundamentally, Saskatchewan supports the principle of one project, one assessment, done in a timely manner, and encourages the committee to consider fundamental changes to CEAA to achieve this goal.
Overlapping requirements between the federal and provincial environmental assessment processes have created procedural and regulatory complexity for all stakeholders that adds significant delays and costs to some projects undertaken in the province. What we see are proponents going to great lengths to avoid triggering CEAA, even if that means doing a suboptimal project, not doing projects or improvements, gaming the system, or attempting project splitting.
While the Government of Canada has attempted to address some of the complexity and problems with CEAA, many problems remain. As a result of these problems, projects take substantially longer to approve than is reasonable, given the state of environmental knowledge. Business opportunities are lost or simply cancelled due to the real costs, time, and resources that CEAA and, importantly, its interpretation by federal authorities, creates. Governments of both levels spend more time and money than necessary on duplicative assessment efforts, and legal challenges under CEAA rarely hinge on technical aspects, or environmental outcomes of a project. Rather, the complexity of CEAA encourages procedural challenges.
The national maturation of environmental regulation over the last 20 years is such that the significant environmental regulatory differences between jurisdictions, which existed when CEAA was first contemplated, do not exist any longer. In fact, Saskatchewan has largely adopted federal standards in most areas of regulation. This maturation of environmental regulation within Canada presents some unique opportunities in the areas of environmental assessment equivalency, elimination of screening-level assessments, and some pragmatic housekeeping items. Saskatchewan believes that enormous efficiencies can be achieved, and the duplication of effort reduced, if CEAA acknowledges the provincial environmental assessment as equivalent to the federal environmental assessment for any CEAA assessment. That is, an environmental assessment done under the Saskatchewan legislation can be used to meet the federal requirements, and vice versa.
Saskatchewan believes its environmental assessment process easily covers the technical needs of the federal assessment by the use of rigorous and comprehensive EA requirements that ensure significant adverse effects are identified and mitigated; by addressing the same factors as set out in section 16 of CEAA; assessing cumulative impacts; providing opportunities for public input, and duty-to-consult requirements; and providing transparency of process and access to information through the ministry website.
We have little disagreement with the projects that qualify for a comprehensive study under CEAA, as these projects, for the most part, would qualify as developments under our act. CEAA's own work shows that most screening-level assessments don't have any significant environmental effects. With a robust provincial regulatory system in place, we believe federal screening-level assessments are unnecessary to ensure environmental protection within provincial boundaries, except for projects where the project proponent is a federal ministry or crown, or the project occurs on federal lands.
This recommendation would have a very low risk to the environment while eliminating significant areas of overlap and duplication. Screening-level triggers are also the area where some responsible authorities failed to make pragmatic decisions about what level of screening is required. There are many instances in Saskatchewan where responsible authority has required an environmental assessment that takes in excess of a year for minor CEAA law list triggers. Provincially, these were simple licensing and permitting matters.
Saskatchewan also recommends that any agreement it makes with CEAA should take legal precedence over any agreement negotiated between CEAA and another federal agency. Accordingly, Saskatchewan recommends that the act confirm the role played by CEAA in negotiating such agreements and add a provision to ensure that such agreements with the provinces bind and take precedence over any agreements entered into with other federal bodies, such as the CNSC or the NEB. This would ensure that all federal agencies are aligned with the federal environmental assessment process and that there would be consistency in all federal-provincial interactions.
The costs to business in missed opportunity have never been effectively studied, but they are likely very large, and there is no evidence that the excessive process added by CEAA provides any benefits to environmental protection, especially at the screening level.
To improve the situation, we recommend the following measures be considered in all aspects of the review: bring more predictability and consistency to the federal environmental assessment process by setting predictable and enforceable timelines; provide mechanisms to reward proponents with less process for good environmental and stewardship practices through the use of new technologies, process upgrades, refurbishment, and so forth—things that will improve environmental performance; and provide exclusions for the projects of substantially similar nature to a project described in the exclusion list regulations and/or projects that will not generate new or increased levels of environmental impacts—i.e., those within the current disturbance footprint of an existing operation—and can be managed by existing regulatory processes.
Saskatchewan supports a vision that would redefine federal and provincial responsibilities to endow Canada with a system based on a principle of one project, one assessment. Consistent with our move to a results-based regulatory framework, Saskatchewan recommends CEAA acknowledge provincial environmental assessments as equivalent to a federal environmental assessment for all projects on provincial lands; also on provincial lands, provide a blanket exclusion from all CEAA screening-level triggers, as these areas of environmental interest are fully covered by existing provincial mechanisms; consider bilateral agreements on environmental cooperation negotiated by CEAA as legally binding on all federal authorities; and introduce proactive and efficient measures that enhance predictability and consistency of the federal EA process and provide incentives for projects that will improve environmental performance.
Fundamentally, we believe that in this time of finite resources, both human and financial, and given the state of environmental knowledge and regulation, there is a unique opportunity to take some of the burden off the regulated community and promote responsible business development and innovation without having to compromise environmental protection.
Thank you.