In 2015, a pipeline was designed to cut through a sensitive wetland in B.C. The professional biologist reviewing the project told his company that there could be significant damage to the wetland and an extensive monitoring program would have to be set up to watch for effects.

The larger consultancy the biologist’s company worked for refused to submit the report to the pipeline company.

“They took it and rewrote it, basically,” he told DeSmog Canada. “It wasn’t my document anymore.”

The biologist, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, said he engaged in a protracted battle with the consultancy, with little effect.

Eventually the B.C. provincial environmental assessment office stepped in and recommended the same monitoring system he originally suggested.

That fight to alter the environmental impacts documented in a scientific report is just one example of the ways professional biologists, engineers, geoscientists and others across the country face pressure from a system with few legislated requirements for scientific rigour.

In interviews with several current and former consultants, the notion was raised again and again that strict rules for scientific integrity could provide a backstop for professionals who are being pressured to alter their recommendations to benefit a project.

That could be about to change, as the federal government introduces a new Impact Assessment Act to replace Canada’s controversial and much-maligned Environmental Assessment Act.

A large majority of Canadians want the new Act to include stricter rules around the inclusion of science, according to a new study released Monday in the journal Facets.

Looking at the comments from public, industry and government solicited by an expert review panel, researchers found the public overwhelmingly asked for more rigorous and transparent scientific analysis of projects during an environmental review.

“In the online questionnaire, people had to rank their top three concerns; science comes out way up there,” said Aerin Jacob, an author of the new study.

The sample of opinions — being drawn from written submissions to the standing committee — is admittedly self-selecting, leaving the paper open to criticisms of selection bias.

“These are people who care enough to be involved, whatever their views are,” Jacob concedes. But other surveys conducted in more traditional ways have returned similar results.

Coauthor Jonathan Moore says what makes the survey unique is that it’s a way of looking at what people are telling the government — thus allowing people to evaluate what the government actually does with that information.

For example, while industry, scientists and the public were aligned on some issues, such as transparency in the government’s decision making, one major area in which industry opinions differed from those of scientists and the public was how rigorous science should be in environmental assessments.

“I think what that means is that the degree to which the government tackled that or not will reveal the degree to which environmental assessment is created for industry or created for the rest of Canada,” Moore said.

Science often not made public

While language in Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s mandate letter instructs her to “ensure that decisions are based on science, facts, and evidence, and serve the public’s interest,” there is no formal requirement for evidence to be made public before decisions are made.

The new study broke down that concept of evidence-based decision making in environmental assessments into five categories: openly sharing information, evaluating cumulative effects, scientific rigour, transparency in decision-making and independence between regulators and proponents.

“These results not only show there’s strong support across multiple sectors, they also give a road map of how to do it,” says Jacob.

“Rather than just saying you should use science or you should do evidence-based decision making — what does that actually mean? — here, we’re showing, here are five fundamental components of having a scientific approach to environmental assessments, and truly follow up on that commitment.”

Currently, the federal cabinet has a high degree of discretion once assessments have been presented to the government, and the factors that were or were not considered are not made public.

Increased transparency was one of the categories on which almost everyone agreed. For industry, it could mean saving time on environmental assessments, by knowing what was coming ahead of time. For the public, it could mean being able to hold politicians accountable for not taking into consideration promises they had made, or priorities they had professed to have.

Just three submissions were opposed to increased transparency in decision-making, compared to more than 150 in favour.

That’s reflected in the recommendations made by the expert panel: that “information be easily accessible, and permanently and publicly available.”

While the proposed new Act uses the word “transparent” several times, it does not require that data be made public by default, just that there be instructions on how the information can be obtained.

“That kind of redirection is not useful,” says Martin Olszynski, a lawyer at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law.

“You know that the agency has an internal file that contains all of that information, and we basically just say, all of that information should be on the public registry.”

“What if there’s a little bit of harm on my project, and there’s a little bit of harm on somebody else’s project, which is right downstream…Who’s looking at the big picture?” https://t.co/iyVNkwLqJy

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 7, 2018

No interconnected knowledge

That lack of transparency also means there are limited opportunities to consider cumulative impacts.

Commenters from the public and even many in industry also asked for more consideration of cumulative effects. Whether through greenhouse gas emissions, air or water quality degradation or wildlife habitat destruction, Jacob said the piling up of effects from different projects is what pushes consequences past a point of no return.

“No one project is going to do that. But together, they do,” she says.

A second professional biologist who spoke to DeSmog Canada on the condition of anonymity said cumulative impacts are among the most insidious, because without specific laws around watching for them, it’s easy to feel pressured to overlook how one project’s impacts stack on those of another nearby.

“What if there’s a little bit of harm on my project, and there’s a little bit of harm on somebody else’s project, which is right downstream…Who’s looking at the big picture?” she asked.

That gap in legislation means that industry-hired professionals have little in the way of recourse when asked to make determinations that they might otherwise feel uncomfortable making. British Columbia is currently conducting a review of the system through which paid consultants are relied upon by the province in environmental decision making (known as professional reliance). The province is also reviewing its environmental assessment process with an eye toward cumulative impacts.

Pressure on professionals

In December of 1980, David Mayhood sent in a report evaluating damage CN Rail had done to a forest in Jasper National Park. It had diverted a stream into the forest to protect its railbed. He found the stream had become impassable for fish because of logjams, while 10 hectares of forest had been wiped out.

“I was fairly graphic in the description about the damage that had been done there,” he said. But there was little appetite for graphic descriptions at the consultancy that had hired him.

“When I got the final copy of the report back with our section in it, it had been drastically changed,” he said. “Where I said an area had been devastated, they said it had been ‘altered.’ ”

Mayhood wrote a letter of protest, but the report was submitted.

He says that kind of pressure to water down language, and consequently undermine the science behind it, has persisted throughout his career.

“The fundamental issue is that biologists…should be independent,” he says. “They aren’t. They’re objectively not independent; they work for a government that has a political agenda, and private industry that also has its own agenda.”

Alana Westwood, science and policy analyst with Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, experienced that lack of independence as she began her career as a junior biologist at a consulting firm. She said that although most experiences met the standard of science, there was one particular firm that went far outside what could be considered objective science.

The consulting company was dominated by one client, an electrical generation company, which held an inordinate amount of power over the quality of science Westwood and her colleagues could do.

“I was routinely asked to do things I had no experience for or training in,” she said. For example, she was asked to conduct a bird survey in what she now knows is the off-season for the birds she was ostensibly looking for, using methods she now knows would never be effective.

And it got worse, when she was asked to do a literature review of the known effects of a particular monitoring technique the firm’s sole client wanted to use.

“Then my boss came to me, and said, of the 20 or so papers you found, how many found no effect, or found it didn’t harm them?” she recalls. There were four papers among the 20.

Her boss was clear on what needed to be done, in order to please the client upon which the entire business turned — like so many biologists before and after her, she would be asked to compromise her training, ethics and better judgment to make life easier for a client whose priority was delivering value to shareholders, rather that protecting the environment.

“Use only those four,” Westwood recalls being told.

As the interview comes to a close, co-author Jonathan Moore loops the conversation around to hockey. In recent years, the NHL — concerned that team doctors were facing conflicts of interest as they assessed players for concussions — decided to change their system.

Today, that assessment is done by outside doctors who wouldn’t face pressure to put unfit players back on the ice.

Moore sees the same possibility for environmental assessment reform to take the pressure away from professionals to deliver what their clients want.

“I find that if Canada can do it for hockey, I would hope they could do it for making these huge decisions that affect the environment and people that rely on the environment.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The future of Alberta’s sprawling tailings ponds is in serious crisis.

As of right now, there is no clear understanding if or how oilsands companies are going to clean up the 1.2 trillion litres of toxic petrochemical waste covering over 220 square kilometres in the province’s northeast.

On Monday, Environmental Defence and the U.S.’s Natural Resources Defense Council published a report that pegged potential costs for cleanup and reclamation at a staggering $51.3 billion: $44.5 billion for cleanup, with an additional $6.8 billion for rehabilitation and monitoring.

That amount exceeds the $41.3 billion in royalties collected by the province of Alberta between 1970 and 2016.

“Increasingly, as an Albertan, I am concerned that these will become public liabilities,” Martin Olszynski, law professor at the University of Calgary and expert in environmental law, tells DeSmog Canada.

“In my view, at this point, it’s more likely than not that they will become public liabilities.”

The two organizations behind the new research called on the Alberta government to reject any new tailings ponds applications and require existing tailings be cleaned up faster than they’re produced.

Hot waste fills a Suncor tailings pond facility. Photo: Alex MacLean

No Tailings Management Plans Approved So Far

With no rules restricting the creation of tailings, oilsands waste ponds grew unabated for over 50 years.

The first rules, introduced in 2009, mandated companies create targets “to minimize and eventually eliminate long-term storage of fluid tailings in the reclamation landscape” but were a complete failure. Every single oilsands company failed to meet their own targets under the new guidelines.

And while the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) introduced Directive 085 in mid-2016 in an attempt to deal with such issues, the effort has so far failed to produce tangible results.

Case in point: Suncor.

Oilsands giant Suncor’s tailings management plan, submitted under the new directive, was rejected by the AER in March.

According to the regulator the plan failed on three accounts: 1) the technology of choice to treat the tailings was allegedly unproven; 2) Suncor “did not provide adequate information” on the proposed alternative; and 3) the actual timeline for reclamation was unproven.

In a surprise move, the AER recently decided to re-review Suncor’s plan, although it is unclear if Suncor has addressed those major issues.

“In the original denial from the AER, [Pembina] agreed with essentially all of those concerns and didn’t feel like Suncor addressed them,” Nina Lothian, senior analyst at Pembina Institute, tells DeSmog Canada.

In its application for reconsideration, Suncor claimed the company didn’t provide proprietary information on new technology. That proprietary information has not been made available to the public.

A spokesperson for the AER tells DeSmog Canada that companies may request confidentiality concerning their application information.

“Confidentiality is rarely requested and only granted in compelling circumstances.”

Smoke, steam, and gas flares rise from the Suncor upgrading facility. Reclamation efforts seen to the right, on what was once a tailing pond. Suncor has reclaimed only 7 per cent of their total land disturbance. Photo: Alex MacLean

Industry Organization Hasn’t Provided Any Info On Tailings Experiment

The undisclosed nature of Suncor’s plans follows a long history of secrecy surrounding industry’s plans for tailings cleanup.

For years, the industry-funded Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) has pledged to work on a massive tailings cleanup facility called the Demonstration Pit Lakes Project.

COSIA has previous said the facility would potentially begin operation in 2017. The outcome of the Pit Lakes Project was meant to help inform the viability of tailings management for decades to come.

But as previously reported by DeSmog Canada, it’s unclear if COSIA has even started on the project.

When contacted for comment, COSIA referred DeSmog to a Syncrude spokesperson who couldn’t account for COSIA’s progress on the file.

Olszynski says Albertans deserve to know if COSIA is working on tailings management.

“The whole point of COSIA was to drive collaboration between oilsands producers recognizing there should be an economy of scale if they work together on some of these major environmental issues because they’re all dealing with the same issues,” he says.

“To then find out there’s some kind of proprietary issue that prevented Suncor from being fully transparent in its application is perplexing.”

When asked if the AER would integrate COSIA’s progress into the re-review of the Suncor plan, a spokesperson for the regulator wrote: “If information about COSIA’s Demonstration Pit Lake project is submitted as part of the application, then we will include it as part of our review.”

At this point, there is no public information about COSIA’s Demonstration Pit Lake project.

Earthen wall to a tailings pond at a Suncor mining site. Photo: Alex MacLean

Tailings Technology Can Take Over Decade To Prove

A key concern for critics of the AER’s decision about the Suncor plan is that of timelines.

Lothian of the Pembina Institute says that many of the tailings management plans that are being presented by proponents have fairly extensive timelines to get the landscape to the point of “ready to reclaim.” That would require a reasonably aggressive treatment in order to reduce the liability on the landscape.

“The plans that have been presented in aggregate are showing that tailings are continuing to accumulate,” she says. “We’re not seeing that sort of treatment and reclamation that we were hoping for.”

According to the AER, Directive 085 “specifies that the risks, benefits, and trade-offs associated with the proposed tailings treatment technology must be understood, have contingencies identified, and risks mitigated.”

But Olszynski says that process to understand if a tailings technology works can take between 10 and 15 years of monitoring. He adds that either COSIA should update its website to indicate that it won’t be able to reach its 2017 target or be forthright with the regulator and Albertans.

The AER didn’t make it clear how it intends to evaluate Suncor’s plan without that information.

Another Seven Tailings Management Plans Being Reviewed By Regulator

At the end of this month, the AER will host an “enhanced review process” of Suncor’s proposed tailings management plan using existing dispute resolution processes, according to an AER spokesperson.

This will be the very first time such a process has ever occurred.

Lothian says the review will be “an opportunity to have a much more constructive, open dialogue with both the proponent and those that have submitted statements of concern.”

It will involve organizations which have filed statements of concern, including the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McKay Métis Community Association, McMurray Métis Local 1935, the Oilsands Environmental Coalition (Pembina and Fort McMurray Environmental Association) and Joslyn Energy Development.

The AER is also reviewing seven other tailings management plans, including from Syncrude, Shell, Imperial Oil and CNRL.

But the outcome of the AER’s reconsideration of the Suncor plan could very well set the tone for the remainder of the process, especially given that it represents the largest oilsands player and the first to receive a verdict.

“We were hopeful under the tailings management framework that we would see much more progressive treatment of tailings, and see that liability reduced on the landscape in the near term,” Lothian concludes.

“The plans that have been presented in aggregate are showing that tailings are continuing to accumulate. We’re not seeing that sort of treatment and reclamation that we were hoping for.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.