Thank you very much.
Thank you to the committee for inviting me to speak today.
I'm speaking to you today with respect to a research project that I undertook in 2014 with colleagues at McGill University and at the University of Washington. This research investigated the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, and that paper was published in 2015 in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
The changes to the NWPA received considerable public and political attention, particularly as they pertained to the potential environmental impacts. The NWPA itself never had an environmental mandate or role, though its relationship to environmental protection was constructed through the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act of 1992, which used the NWPA as a triggering mechanism.
In 2012, the changes to the CEAA removed that triggering mechanism, and the CEAA adopted the designated projects list. Meanwhile, the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act removed comprehensive federal oversight of waterway navigability through the creation of its schedule A list of waters.
What has this meant for oversight?
According to the CEAA online registry, there were 2,400 environmental assessment projects conducted between 2003 and 2012 that were triggered by the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Fifty-eight per cent of these projects were conducted on waterways that no longer receive protection under the Navigation Protection Act. Projects occurring on ocean basins, which remain on schedule A, account for approximately 30% of those environmental assessment projects, while only 11.1% of projects occurred on lakes and rivers that today are included on schedule A.
With respect to oversight, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve seen a pretty dramatic decrease in federal project oversight on lakes and rivers in Canada. However, it is important to note that reducing the NPA oversight does not necessarily mean that there is no federal oversight on a project. Projects requiring environmental assessment, if they appear on the designated projects list, may still occur on non-schedule A waterways. Federal oversight might also be achieved through other legislation, such as the Fisheries Act. However, at this time, I don't have, and I believe the public does not have, a clear sense of what the gaps are under the new regulatory framework. The concurrent changes to the Fisheries Act in 2012 might have had a similar effect in reducing federal oversight, or these parallel pieces of legislation may continue to work together to provide comparable levels. At this point, though, I think it's pretty unclear what that looks like.
The Navigation Protection Act defines navigation with respect to recreation and commercial uses. How we think about navigation and what types of navigation are important had a major impact on the way that the schedule A list of lakes and rivers was defined.
The best we can tell from the information we received through our ATIP requests is that the schedule A list of lakes and rivers was compiled through a fairly narrowly defined process. That process created a composite score for each waterway’s navigation pressure. Those scores were based on service levels as determined by the Canadian Hydrographic Service's freight movement statistics, on past work that indicated navigation, and on survey scores based on regional managers' knowledge regarding regionally important navigable waters.
Under these metrics, recreational and commercial activities are heightened over and above the natural or environmental importance of certain waterways or their relationship to subsistence activities. Thus, moving forward, I think it's critically important to consider how we define or think about navigation.
Finally, this question about how the schedule A list came about speaks to my final point: we need to think about how to build opportunities for more consultation or transparency into this review process.
The origin of schedule A was of particular interest to our research team, and subsequently, we submitted two ATIP requests.
The first request asked to look at the qualitative assessment of lakes and rivers under review, while our second request asked for the larger quantitative assessment, which marked the first step in the process. Throughout our research efforts, we weren't actually able to get a full picture of the process as the quantitative assessment was held back due to cabinet confidence. Therefore, we've had to speculate a little about some of the metrics that went into this process.
Overall, transparency and clarity appear to be two core issues that face this review and the review of the new environmental and regulatory framework as a whole. I think there's a failure in understanding the gaps that exist now within the new legislative framework, and that uncertainty makes it quite difficult to reach an informed consensus about the public comfort or the public expectations for the environmental regulatory regime.
Thank you.
