Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I'm honoured to be here today. I want to thank the committee for asking me to participate in this very important process.
I'm going to focus my presentation on three key points around the regulatory regime in Newfoundland and Labrador. That's my primary focus: Newfoundland and Labrador. The key points are going to be around transparency, the conflict between the Atlantic accord and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the intersection between the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board--the C-NLOPB--and the Migratory Birds Convention Act.
I want to first consider the context in which we're operating oil and gas in Newfoundland on the Grand Banks. The northwest Atlantic is a globally important habitat for some 30 million to 40 million migratory seabirds, some of which come from Greenland, Antarctica, and the Gulf of Mexico. Seabirds are also a local resource, providing revenue for tourism, and locals also hunt certain species of seabirds. Environmental assessments associated with offshore oil and gas production identified seabirds as what's called a “valued ecosystem component”. They also identified these organisms as the group most vulnerable to oil pollution.
Transparency is a value identified by the federal and provincial governments of Canada through various acts. When a process is transparent, it is understood to be open to public scrutiny, yet this fundamental value of transparency is exactly what's missing from the current administration of offshore oil and gas in eastern Canada. I will support this statement with two examples. I had three; I was going to do one, but since I have a little bit more time, I'll do two.
Here is the first example. In conjunction with Newfoundland-based non-governmental organizations that had participated in the environmental assessment reviews for all three offshore oil and gas production projects, we placed four freedom of information requests between 2006 and 2007 to the C-NLOPB. All four requests were related either to pollutants containing oil or oil-like substances or were related to oil spills. We were requesting these data to evaluate how the operators meet waste treatment guidelines and to specifically link environmental assessment predictions to realized effects. All of the information was requested. It was underlined by our interest in understanding how offshore oil and gas intersects with marine birds.
Offshore oil and gas projects are approved on a basis of risks to the environment, and these risks are presented in the environmental assessments. Following the EA approval, the responsible authority, which is the C-NLOPB in this case, approves what's called an environmental effects monitoring program. Environmental effects monitoring programs are critical, as they verify--or should verify--what the realized impacts are. Without linking environmental assessments to environmental effects monitoring programs, environmental assessments are a paper exercise in which nothing is learned. Marine ecosystems are not well understood, and therefore it's important that we proceed in a transparent manner with marine-based industries so that we can improve our understanding of these complex systems.
All four of those data requests were denied.
The second example of the lack of transparency was another request that we placed to the C-NLOPB in 2007. This was not for data, but for information regarding the methods used to understand how they determine the effects of an oil spill on wildlife. We asked for the methods, not data.
That request was also denied.
So all of the requests for information--five requests in all--were denied to the very stakeholders who had reviewed these environmental assessments. The C-NLOPB cited subsection 119(2) under the Atlantic accord as the reason for this denial. They were unable to disclose information because the operators did not want the information disclosed.
This lack of transparency associated with the Atlantic accord creates other problems. One is the relationship with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act expresses a commitment to “facilitating public participation in the environmental assessment of projects...and providing access to the information on which those environmental assessments are based”.
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act has committed to doing follow-up programs related to environmental assessments through these environmental effects monitoring programs. Based on the examples that I provided, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act is in fact in direct conflict with the Atlantic accord under subsection 119(2). Further, the C-NLOPB is also placed in a conflict because they are both supposed to promote public engagement through these environmental assessment processes and subsequently deny data related to those environmental assessments.
The final point I would like to make is that the C-NLOPB is self-described as at arm's length from government, yet this same entity is the decision-making body related to issues around the protection of migratory birds. It's Environment Canada's mandate to enforce the Migratory Birds Convention Act, but through a memorandum of understanding that Environment Canada and the C-NLOPB signed in 1988, Environment Canada is moved to a position of consultation in all issues relating to offshore oil and gas. While I don't have time to present the details--perhaps I could give you some in the follow-up questions--my colleague and I have conducted research that demonstrates that this arrangement is compromising Canada's international obligations to protect migratory seabirds.
Mr. Chairman and the committee, this appears to me to be a very serious issue on which I would recommend that this committee seek legal counsel.
To conclude, the devolution of federal jurisdiction over environmental protection through the creation of these special status bodies such as the petroleum boards, in my professional opinion, requires review. The current legislative structure does not provide the marine environment with full protection or complement our understanding from offshore oil and gas activities. The Atlantic accords are flawed, and this is manifested by a lack of transparency. An immediate recommendation would be to change the particular sections of the Atlantic accord that relate to transparency, including subsection 119(2) in the Atlantic accord and section 122 in the Nova Scotia accord. I would also recommend the use of third-party independent biological and technical observers on board all oil and gas operations.
In the current system, transparency is not a public right but is administered as a privilege granted by the industry when it decides whether or not to release information. We cannot hope for sound management, which I assume is what this committee is aiming for, to reach its full potential without the fundamental value of transparency, and I would argue that a broad review of related legislation is in fact fully required to address these challenges.
Thank you for your time.