Evidence of meeting #6 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 federal.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
But I do understand that you are the managing partner of Ecovision Law. Is that your own law practice?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
I also understand that you are a counsel with Ecojustice. Is that correct?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
And you have in fact appeared in other venues to talk about the environmental assessment at the federal level.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
In particular, you were at a conference for the OAIA on October 14, 2010. I guess that's over a year ago already. Do you recall that?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
You were there and presented a paper entitled “Federal EA: Revisiting First Principles”. You remember that?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
The information I have is that you were there presenting as a counsel for Ecojustice. Do you recall that?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
So I'm assuming at that point that you would be speaking for Ecojustice.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
I was very interested in some of the suggestions for reform that you presented to that conference. In particular one of them, I understand, was that there should be a focusing of CEAA on bigger projects with better EAs and that could ease provincial and private sector concerns. Do you recall that general recommendation?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
Because this has been touched on by a number of questioners already, I'd like to come to grips with what you mean by “bigger projects” in that recommendation you made as Ecojustice counsel.
As an Individual
I think a starting point, actually, are the major projects identified by the Major Projects Management Office. If it's big enough to be of interest to MPMO, then there probably should be a serious environmental assessment done, either a comp study or a panel review.
That just gives you a flavour for it. It's not so easy to say what a major project is; it has to be with dynamics or an iterative process, because new things are coming up all the time. Ten years ago, we didn't worry so much about wind farm projects. Now that's one of the biggest issues we have.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
So that's really the difficulty because, as a legislative committee, we want to give some guidance to the Major Projects Management Office, perhaps, so are we talking in terms of dollar value, in terms of square miles or hectares that are affected by a project? What sorts of parameters are you referring to when you talk about a bigger project?
As an Individual
Well, there are a couple of ways of coming at it. You've suggested a couple. One, you could go with the dollar value for the project. Or you could go with a test in terms of some environmental indicator. For example, you could say any projects that would result in greenhouse gas emissions greater than x tonnes of CO2 equivalent.... That might trigger a federal assessment, given that we're trying to reduce our....
You could have some indicator of project size in terms of dollar value, or it could be the size of the footprint, potentially, although I see more problems with that one, or it could be in terms of some environmental indicator.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
I'd like to just talk about the flip side of this question. I'll reference a presentation that you made earlier this year on April 15, 2011, to the Queen's Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy. Your paper was entitled “Environmental Assessment in the Climate Century”. This one has your Ecovision Law logo on it, so I assume you were speaking on behalf of your law firm at that time. Is that right?
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
In particular, you made comment in this paper as to significant shortcomings of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. One of the shortcomings was: “Too much sweating of small stuff (legal requirements for small projects)”. So the flip side of what we were just talking about is this: how would you define “small projects” that perhaps shouldn't necessarily be caught up in CEAA?
As an Individual
Well, I think a small project is a project that isn't a major project, so I think they're two sides of the same coin.