Thank you for giving me this opportunity to represent the Council. If there are no objections, I would prefer to make my presentation in English.
Regional planning assists northern development by being holistic: providing a clear vision of the appropriate balance between conservation and development interests applicable to the circumstances of a given region. It does help to ensure orderly and efficient provision of infrastructure and an appropriate land management regulatory and policy framework.
Providing present and future potential land users with greater certainty and access to valued resources is also an important consideration, as well as the flexibility of creating plans that can adapt to new knowledge. Land use planning also helps to prevent and, hopefully, resolve conflicts. Also, an important thing from industry's point of view is that it helps to reduce risk.
One of the other advantages of regional planning is that it provides an upfront and overarching framework for individual projects as well as socio-economic and environmental assessments. It's interesting that the back end of the process presented to you first. We're the front end of the process.
If regional planning is done right, it can facilitate positive development. I'm going to give you a bit of history about land use planning in the north.
Really, the key sort of change situation was the 1977 Berger report dealing with the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. Berger recommended a 10-year moratorium on major development to allow time for the settlement of land claims and to build governance capacity. He also recommended that regional planning follow immediately after land claims settlement.
DIAND tried a top-down planning process in 1985 and it didn't work, mainly because first nations were more concentrated on resolving land claim negotiations. So only to the extent that planning contributed to resolving a claim or assisting a first nation to make its case for its land claim were they prepared to participate.
The program was cancelled in 1990 and later resurrected, and in the case of Yukon, specifically because it was included in the 1993 Umbrella Final Agreement and tied to the first four land claim and self-government agreements, which involved the Teslin Tlingit Council, the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, of which Stephen is a member, the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, and the Nacho Nyak Dun.
The key is chapter 11, but I'm not going to go into detail. What I want to tell you is that only one plan has been completed after all this time and that is the North Yukon Land Use Plan. But a second plan for the Peel region has reached the recommended plan stage. Unfortunately, these plans are taking too long to complete and they're costing too much. Why?
In the first place, there is the amount of time required for preplanning, setting up commissions, and collecting basic resource information. Much of the resource information is sketchy, incomplete, of questionable accuracy, and out of date. This is primarily because of the lack of government attention to science. Science is not seen as an investment but as a cost, so governments at both the federal and territorial levels have consistently been cutting back and looking to development proponents to do their work for them.
Regional planning is funded through the land claim implementation process. Here's one place you can help us. There's a 10-year implementation review that is now in year 14, and we don't believe Canada is taking the completion of this review seriously enough. We also note that the Auditor General has already rapped DIAND's efforts north of 60, calling for more accountability and consequences for non-performance. We agree, but this must apply to all involved.
First nations have not received adequate funding to build their own capacity to participate in land use planning or development assessment. High staff turnover, inadequate funding, and lack of qualified first nations people are part of the problem.
It's interesting that in the committee's discussion we talk about the definition of the north as being the three territories. As a planner, I don't think that way. I see two norths.
There's one that incorporates the boreal forest, which is the southern band of the territories in the northern parts of the provinces and stretches from coast to coast. The 60th parallel is really an artificial boundary.
The north is also not an unoccupied frontier. The development game has changed, particularly with the emergence of the territorial governments. But I can assure you that it's taken well over 35 years for people to get the message that the old ways of doing business are no longer appropriate.
This planning takes a more holistic approach. We're really dealing with the front end versus the back end. Planning adds value and context for development assessment. One of the weaknesses in the YESAA legislation, from our point of view, is in the implementation. That is, if there is no land use plan existing and it is in the process of being developed, say, remembering that this can be a three-year or four-year process, it's business as usual.
What business as usual means is that the commissions must focus on getting their plan done, and as council we have told them this. We tell them, “Don't get involved in the YESAA process”. That's government's responsibility at this stage.
But then we have the scenario where a plan is completed and the issue becomes, “What do you do when a proponent brings forward a proposal that is inconsistent with the plan?” This is an area that requires greater clarity. At the present time under YESAA, the assessor is to assist the proponent in trying to facilitate as much compliance as possible, but effectively he recommends to the parties if it's not compliant. That's really up to the governments, then, which are the parties, to make a decision. But there's a question we have here. At that point, really, shouldn't the proponent have to stop, go back, and seek a planned amendment?
There are some implications of the business-as-usual approach to doing plan preparation. For example, you have the whole issue of claim staking and the free entry rights. In the case of the Peel plan, which is in a very environmentally sensitive area, there was a concern of the conservation side of the equation. Wait a minute, they said, there's all this staking going on at the same time, but in effect we can't go in and stake our interest; only the mining people get to stake their interest. I think it's a fair point that's worth consideration.
It's somewhat ironic that industry considers best practices as being an adequate standard whereas we tend to think of them as the minimum standard.
If we're going to make plans more successful, we need more strategic thinking and we need to be thinking about how strategic investment has paid off. A good example is the extension of the Internet to the north, the telehealth concept, and things like RADARSAT, that technology. Ironically, conservation organizations sometimes seem to have a better appreciation of the needs for strategic thinking than the development industry or the respective governments.
We believe that development planning and conservation planning can and should proceed in hand in the north. The Yukon is too polarized, but the NWT has been a bit more successful in that regard.
So how can we improve planning quickly?
Our 10-year review is going on year 14, and it sure would help if we could get that solved. Also, I believe that first nations have to spend more time resolving overlap issues with respect to their boundaries, because it makes it very difficult to plan when there are areas that are in conflict. The council's position has been that the planning boundaries must be seamless and there should be no doughnuts.
As well, Canada and Yukon both have to insist on greater accountability for plan production.
We need to get the outstanding land claim negotiations going again, particularly with respect to White River and the Kaska.
We have some suggestions in terms of how things can be improved. One of the interesting things—
