Thank you, Mr. McKinnon.
Thank you, honourable members and Chair, for inviting me back to appear before you in a slightly warmer location than Whitehorse when you were there. I only say “slightly”; it is a little chilly still.
I will just continue on what Mr. McKinnon had to say. YESAA replaced several formal and informal assessment processes when it came into force. It really did slice through some complex land ownership issues that were created partly from first nation final agreements, but also in association with the Canada-Yukon devolution agreement.
Some of the unique aspects of YESAA are that it looks not only at environmental effects, but at socio-economic effects, that it also integrates local and traditional knowledge into assessments, and that it provides for guaranteed opportunities to participate for all Yukoners, including first nations.
Another key aspect of YESAA is that it calls for timelines for all stages of assessment. As Mr. McKinnon mentioned, at our designated office levels, these timelines have I think all been met, and in most cases, exceeded—to the good, not to the bad.
Having said that I believe this process has worked very well over the last four years, I would add that there are some ways to improve it. At the current time, there are two different reviews taking place. There's a five-year review being conducted by the three parties to the Umbrella Final Agreement, those being the Government of Canada, the Yukon, and the Council of Yukon First Nations. We have participated in these reviews in providing input. We also have understood some of the concerns that have been raised, as well as some of the good things that have been identified as part of that review.
When we brought in our rules and started assessing, we promised Yukoners that we would go back out to Yukoners after a couple of years of practice and would vary our rules to fix any issues that came up. We have been doing that as well. We have reviewed our rules at the designated office level, because that's where we have around 1,000 assessments, and we are implementing some changes that we hope to have in place by the end of this fiscal year.
These changes are based on input from first nations and all the regulators of the other governments, as well as various environmental and industry groups, including the mining industry, the chamber of commerce, and other proponent groups. We believe these changes will improve the rules at the designated office level.
Part of our discussion here is around barriers and solutions. I want to identify a few.
One of the biggest barriers that we find involves capacity. First of all, first nations and even some of the governments, federal and territorial, are still getting used to this process after four years and are not always prepared to participate or to provide input into these assessments in a timely way. First nations are trying to participate in our assessments while trying also to implement their new governments.
Another issue around capacity is that we have five of our offices located out in communities throughout the Yukon. We find that we're competing for a very small skilled labour pool in each community. We're competing against first nations and other governments, as well as private industry, in trying to get skilled, qualified people to work in our offices. As a result, we've had to look at importing people from other parts of the Yukon as well as people from outside the Yukon to fill these positions.
This has only caused more issues around our very tight housing and the other shortages in the communities. For a solution to that, we've been trying to work with the Yukon Mining Advisory Committee and other groups to say that we need more training in the community, that we need to steer people into these professions. I think this work, with Yukon College, will be very helpful. That definitely is a solution: the training of people in these offices. We want community members assessing projects that mostly affect their communities.
Another issue that has come up is with respect to what we call decision bodies, or regulators. At this time, all governments are having some difficulty in including socio-economic conditions in any of their licences. For example, DFO has a great difficulty in putting socio-economic mitigations into a licence. So does the Yukon government, and so do the first nations. The solution to this is regulatory change at that level—not necessarily to our act, but at the actual regulatory level.
The second side of this is a difficulty in coordinating federal regulators in our assessment process. Currently, Transport Canada does not participate in the front end of our assessments. It only takes part towards the end, but by that time, we've already made it clear what information we need from proponents and have already assessed the project. Then Transport Canada enters as a regulator and we run a real risk of uncertainty in the process if we have not assessed all issues that Transport Canada requires.
One solution I'm starting to see come forward is through CanNor and the Northern Project Management Office. We have met with them over the last couple of weeks. We see a real role for that major projects office in trying to coordinate some of the various federal regulators, whether that's Transport Canada, DFO, or some other federal department. If this continues, I think it's a good, positive sign with regard to that particular office.
I will identify one other issue. It will feed in nicely to Mr. Robertson's presentation. It is that when the Umbrella Final Agreement and the first nation agreements came into force, we envisaged chapter 12, which was the development assessment process or YESAA, and there was also chapter 11, which dealt with land use planning.
It was always thought that land use planning would feed into our assessments. To date, only one land use plan has been enacted in the Yukon. Not having land use plans does sort of force us to assess in a bit of a vacuum. We think these plans are key tools as part of any assessment. Adding completed plans, along with additional completed resource management plans, whether for renewable or non-renewable resources, will greatly help us in completing our assessments and probably will shorten timelines for assessments as well.
Thank you.