ENVI Committee Report

The Web site home page for the Agency declares in large font: Environmental Assessment: Making a Difference. But is it really?

The Committee believes that EA is, by and large, taken much more seriously by the federal government than it was in the late 1980s; however, tangible benefits to the environment are difficult to identify. Stephen Hazell, former Director of Regulatory Affairs at the Agency and author of Canada v. The Environment: Federal Environmental Assessment 1984-1998, observes:

[CEAA] has clearly spurred the development of a culture of environmental assessment in at least parts of all major federal departments. The CEAA public registry system has greatly increased public access to information about federal environmental assessments, notwithstanding the concerns of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainable Development.

Hazell notes that possibly the most important benefit of CEAA has been in proposing measures to mitigate the adverse environmental effects of projects. Bill C-9 amendments regarding follow-up to EAs should help ensure such measures are implemented and are effective.

In March 2000, the Agency published a booklet entitled Federal Environmental Assessment: Making a Difference, which describes the benefits of CEAA EAs for 12 projects. How representative these projects are of EA in Canada is difficult to assess given that they are a small proportion of the 30,000 projects completed under CEAA so far, and standardized indicators or measures of success were not explicit. However, the booklet does represent a recognition that EAs must lead to concrete benefits for the environment, and not serve merely as an exercise that may or may not affect actual decisions about how or whether projects should proceed.

To really make a difference, the Committee firmly believes that EA should:

The Committee asks the following questions to assess whether EA is making a difference:

2.1       Is Environmental Assessment Being Used to Address Major Environmental Issues and Projects?

One way of determining if EA is making a difference is to ask whether or not and how EA, CEAA in particular, is being applied to key environmental issues and projects, for example:

The Government of Canada has consistently opposed applying federal EA to the issuance of fishing licences and allocations, even to the most environmentally destructive forms of fishing such as bottom trawling.

The Agency held a workshop in early 2002 on applying EA to climate change issues, but how much attention was paid to that workshop? Otherwise greenhouse gas emissions figure infrequently in federal environmental assessments.

CEAA (with other EA processes) will almost certainly be applied to the Mackenzie gas pipeline and the Yukon/British Columbia portions of the Alaska Highway pipeline, and has been applied to projects such as new diamond mines in the Northwest Territories, the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine in Labrador, and the Cheviot coal mine in Alberta. Massive road building and logging schemes, however, are typically approved in northern regions of many provinces without involving federal or provincial EA. EAs of major projects in intact wilderness areas rarely consider the need to establish networks of protected areas to ensure that wilderness values are sustained.

Endangered species issues are often considered in federal EAs when information is available to EA practitioners (which is not always the case). Invasive species introductions into Canada are usually accidental so application of EA here is more difficult; however, CEAA could be used to examine activities (e.g., releases of bilge water in Canadian waters) that can result in invasive species being released into Canada.

Witnesses provided many examples of major projects that should have triggered a panel review or comprehensive study but did not. For example, a seriously flawed EA was described by Don Sullivan, Executive Director of Manitoba’s Future Forest Alliance. He explained how the CEAA assessment of the gigantic Tolko logging project in northern Manitoba (11 million hectares) was limited to assessing the environmental impact of two bridges and their abutments. His evidence provides a dramatic example of the way in which narrow project scoping results in major landscape-scale development without any coordinated assessment of the environmental impacts.

The federal government has exclusive authority over several environmental issues not addressed by any of the provincial regulatory review processes, including fisheries and migratory birds. … It also bears noting that the federal government was the first signatory to the Biodiversity Convention which was subsequently ratified in 1992 and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency has published a guide to assessing biodiversity impacts. Nevertheless, there was no consideration of biodiversity impacts even for an assessment limited to a bridge and the physical effects of other bridges. For years leading up to the proponent’s Navigable Waters Protection Act bridge application, the Alliance sought to trigger federal panel reviews under section 46 of the CEAA due to the transboundary effects of forest harvesting from the proposed Repap/Tolko and LP projects. Each of these requests was denied. Thus, the interprovincial and international effects of mill expansion discharging into interprovincial waters and forest harvesting destroying internationally significant bird habitat and millions of hectares of high quality fish habitat were never considered by the Minister. (Meeting 73)

The Committee also heard about the proposed Bruce nuclear waste storage facility, which was not referred to a panel review. Normand de la Chevrotiere, President of the Inverhuron and District Ratepayers Association, spoke in highly emotional terms about the potential health consequences of the proposed storage facility, for which there was no panel review even though it would be the world’s largest nuclear waste storage facility.

Other witnesses complained about the November 1996 decision by the Minister of International Trade and the Minister of Finance not to conduct an EA with respect to the sale of two CANDU reactors to China supported by a $1.5 billion loan by the Government of Canada.

The Committee concludes that although thousands of small projects are assessed more or less effectively under CEAA each year, many large, potentially environmentally damaging projects avoid assessment or are scoped so narrowly as to make the EA of questionable value.

2.2       Is Environmental Assessment Resulting in Benefits to the Environment?

With the exception of limited anecdotal evidence, the benefits of EA to the sustainability of projects and the protection of ecosystems has not been monitored in a systematic manner. The Committee notes that in 1998 the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development observed that “[t]he federal government is not gathering the information needed to let Canadians know whether or not environmental assessment is achieving expected results.” (Paragraph 6.5, Chapter 6, 1998 Report)

The Committee believes that the provisions in Bill C-9 that require follow-up for project EAs should result in better information about how EAs are benefiting the environment. However, determining whether or not EAs will generate environmental benefits is difficult until adequate ecological baseline studies are in place. Some federal authorities, such as Parks Canada Agency, are currently preparing such studies within the framework of national park management plans and the ecological integrity program.

2.3       Is the Federal Government Committed to Environmental Assessment?

Many witnesses were not convinced that senior levels of government are committed to EA. One indicator of low levels of commitment is the cuts to funding and personnel for EA in recent years. An Agency study estimated that total federal spending on EA was roughly $40-$45 million in 1995, the first year of CEAA’s implementation. The Green Plan provided about $32 million of that total. With the termination of the Green Plan in March 1997, funding for EA was sharply reduced with little public debate. Exact spending figures are difficult to extract from government documents, as EA spending is spread across government. Some of that Green Plan funding has been rolled into the permanent budgets of the Agency and departments, but the shortfall is still dramatic. Further, Treasury Board funding for the Agency’s public participation program ($1.2 million/year) ended on March 31, 1998, and was replaced by funding for public participation in review panels directly related to the overall level of panel review activity in a given year. Although the Agency established a planned level of $1 million in participant funding, actual 2001-2002 participant funding costs are expected to be less than $100,000. According to the Minister of the Environment, David Anderson, the government is committed to providing an additional $51 million over the next five years to implement the revised EA process.

A second indicator is that none of the four most recent ministers of the Environment have used their authority to order panel reviews under sections 26, and 46 to 48 for a project that may cause significant adverse transboundary environmental effects. Panel reviews have been requested for the proposed Greenwich commercial resort adjacent to Prince Edward Island National Park, the Diavik diamond mine in Northwest Territories, the Bruce nuclear waste storage facility, the Vancouver Port Corporation’s Deltaport container terminal project in the Fraser River delta, and for the Louisiana-Pacific oriented strand board mill and Tolko projects in Manitoba, among others. The failure to use these powers has not occurred because of any reluctance on the part of environmental and Aboriginal groups to request such referrals.

A third indicator of low levels of commitment to EA at senior levels is that little progress is being made in assessing the environmental impact of proposed policies, programs and plans that need Cabinet approval (a 1990 Cabinet directive requires that such a “strategic environmental assessment” be undertaken). In this respect Canada lags behind many countries, particularly in the European Union, which have already put into practice strategic environmental assessment regimes. In addition, implementation of the Cabinet directive is sporadic and, to make matters worse, it was weakened in 1999. In 1998 the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development found that “Departments have been slow to implement EA of programs and policies as required by a 1990 Cabinet directive.” The Commissioner recommended that, “The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency should work with other federal departments and agencies to improve compliance with the Cabinet directive on the environmental assessment of policies and programs.” (Chapter 6, 1998 Report)

The Committee sees grounds for cautious optimism in the improvements made to federal EA by Bill C-9, as amended. However, the historical reality is that the commitment of Cabinet and Privy Council Office to EA has been sporadic to non-existent in recent years.