Study Finds no Evidence of Federal Environmental Assessment Backlog

A new study has found that there is no evidence of the delays in the federal environmental review process that lead to the sweeping changes the Harper government introduced in last year’s omnibus budget bill C38.

The study, published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, found that the average time for reviews was already less than two years for large projects and a year for smaller projects, which fit well within the guidelines established by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

“Inordinately long review times may be a misperception based on a minority of cases, and thus the recent environmental policy changes in Canada may have little effect on the pace of economic growth,” concludes the paper, written by Derrick Tupper de Kerckhove, Charles Kenneth Minns and Brian John Shuter of the University of Toronto.

“Governments should recognize that environmental oversight is a necessary and valuable component of the approval process for development projects and that alternate options exist for managing the submission load aside from weakening environmental protection.”

De Kerckhove told CBC’s As It Happens that he became interested in the topic because of his experience working in environmental assessment before he began his PhD at the U of T. Having worked in large and small projects around Alberta, he says that he had always found the process “fairly efficient.”

When he began looking for data to back up the government’s claims, he found that no comprehensive studies had been done on environmental assessment wait times in Canada. There had only been a few in the US.

Using publicly available annual reports from parliament to calculate the time involved in the average assessment, the authors found that in most cases the timeline was well within parameters. They found no evidence at all of a backlog.

Many, including First Nations and environmental groups, have argued that the changes laid out in C38 significantly weakened environmental protections by leaving the assessment process to provincial governments.

CBC News points out that one example of the importance of the national review process is the case of the Taseko Mines proposal to build in Fish Lake in British Columbia. The $1.1 billion project was originally approved by the BC government, but after an outcry by First Nations groups was rejected by the federal government.

They argue that provincial assessments tend to take a "narrower" view of environmental repercussions in projects like this, making rejections comparatively rare. Federal assessments offer opportunities for a wider range of voices, including First Nations groups who rely or have traditional claims upon the land in question. Cutting down on federal assessments, many argue, means cutting First Nations groups who are most effected by development out of the discussion entirely.

The report points out that massive changes to the environmental review process such as those introduced in Bill C38 are foolish without first identifying specific issues within the system. “It’s important to know the sources of delays for large projects before you go about changing laws,” de Kerckhove said.

Rather than streamlining it, he believes that C38 may have already caused the delays it was seeking to mitigate by creating staff shortages within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

“Now we’ve taken a review process that seemed to be fairly efficient and because of extensive cutbacks may not be as efficient any more,” he said. “Yet instead of finding other ways of improving our environmental review, we’re setting arbitrary timelines, which might further weaken environmental protection in Canada.”