The Harper government is rewriting the rules of environmental assessments, handing the Environment Ministry the power to minimize reviews of projects from open-pit mines to municipal construction along with other changes that critics claim will “gut” the environmental review process.
Suggestions of change to the environmental review regime were contained in the March federal budget, but the extent of the changes came to light with the release of the bill that implements financial aspects of the government’s new economic measures. Placing the reforms inside a budget bill forces the opposition parties to either accept them or bring down the minority government.
Environment Minister Jim Prentice said the changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act will ensure “that we get good environmental outcomes” while “not delaying and frustrating projects through unnecessary red tape.”
The measures would remove the obligation for a federal environmental assessment to be conducted on projects funded though federal programs, including those that channel infrastructure money to municipalities and first nations. They would also turn assessments of energy projects that are currently conducted by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency over to the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
And they would give the Minister of the Environment the power to determine the scope of any assessment.
Environmentalists say the measures will substantially weaken a cornerstone of Canada’s conservation law. And the opposition Liberals agree.
“This is a poison bill,” Liberal environment critic David McGuinty said. The Conservatives “are increasingly using the unpalatable mechanism of a budget to do all of this and it’s very hardball and it’s unnecessary.”
The Liberals have said they will allow the budget bill to pass by keeping a number of their members out of the House of Commons during the vote. To do otherwise would prompt an election – something no party wants at this juncture.
While Mr. McGuinty said his party supports improvements to the way environmental assessments are conducted, he conceded that this is a “troubling set of proposed changes.”
The reforms follow a January Supreme Court ruling that the federal government violated the law by conducting only a partial review of the Red Chris copper and gold mine in northern British Columbia, rather than an in-depth study of all the possible environmental impacts of the project.
Various departments have spent “not simply months but in fact years” trying to determine who should take the lead on some projects, making it all but impossible for the federal government to co-ordinate its reviews with those done by the provinces, Mr. Prentice said.
As an example of the delays, he pointed to the proposed Ruby Creek molybdenum mine in British Columbia, a $414-million project where the federal assessment took 18 months longer than one conducted by the province. This caused a delay in the creation of hundreds of jobs, without any additional environment benefit, according to the government.
Now, with the federal government stepping aside from many assessments, a larger number will be left in provincial hands.
“The capacity of provincial governments to hold environmental assessments varies,” said John Bennett of the Sierra Club, an environmental lobby group. “In the big provinces with lots of money you have pretty good environmental assessments. In the small provinces where you don’t have lots of money, you tend to have one-day hearings and a rubber stamp.”
A review of the Environmental Assessment Act, which must be re-examined every five years, was to have commenced in May.
“So the government had every opportunity to make these arguments in the public and in the proper forum and instead they have just turned their back on the public and the Parliament and said we are going to change this in a way that there will be no discussion,” Mr. Bennett said.
