For more than two decades, Mark Hipfner has been studying seabirds on the Scott Islands, a small archipelago off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.

There’s the “charismatic” tufted puffin, with its orange beak and iconic hair-do. The Cassin’s auklet that will travel up to 100 kilometres from its nest and propel itself deep into the ocean in search of food. And the common murre, which learns to swim before it can fly and looks a bit like a penguin.

More than a million seabirds nest on these islands every year. Many more feed in the area, migrating vast distances for the fish and zooplankton found in the surrounding waters. 

“In the summer, the place just comes alive,” said Hipfner, a seabird biologist with the wildlife research division of Environment and Climate Change Canada.

As climate change leads to warmer oceans and more extreme heat events, it’s threatening the seabirds of the Scott Islands, some of which have already been listed as species at risk. Now, a new lawsuit, brought by the David Suzuki Foundation and World Wildlife Fund Canada against the federal government and two companies, has shone a light on another potential threat: offshore oil and gas.

Though the 11,546 square kilometres of marine waters surrounding the Scott Islands were protected as a marine National Wildlife Area in 2018, the federal government has yet to revoke a series of decades-old offshore oil and gas exploration permits that overlap with the wildlife area. 

Ian Miron, an Ecojustice lawyer representing the two environmental organizations in this case, said there’s a loophole in the protection that means the environment minister could permit activities, such as exploratory drilling, that wouldn’t typically be allowed in a protected area.

The regulations for the Scott Islands protected area prohibit any “activity that is likely to disturb, damage or destroy wildlife or its habitat.” But they also give the minister authority to allow activities that would damage habitat or otherwise negatively affect wildlife as long as the activity isn’t likely to compromise wildlife conservation. Just how conservation can be upheld while habitat and wildlife are put at risk isn’t clarified in the regulations.

“These permits … serve as a threat that’s just lurking out there,” Miron said.

Oil and gas permits issued in the 1960s and 1970s should have expired

Since 1972, a federal moratorium has prevented any offshore oil and gas exploration off the coast of B.C. A federal review panel in the early 2000s consulted British Columbians and concluded that 75 per cent of people who participated wanted the moratorium to remain in place.

Two decades later, Miron warns there’s nothing preventing the moratorium from being overturned in the future.

“Given Canada’s recent support for a rapid expansion of offshore oil and gas development on the East Coast, that definitely raises the urgency level in terms of getting these expired permits off the books so something similar doesn’t happen on the West Coast,” he said.

The David Suzuki Foundation and WWF-Canada have asked the Federal Court to declare the permits expired in an application for judicial review filed July 26.

Eighteen of the permits that overlap with the Scott Islands marine wildlife area are owned by Chevron Canada, while one is held by ExxonMobil. Another permit held by Chevron overlaps with the Hecate Strait/Queen Charlotte Sound Glass Sponge Reefs Marine Protected Area. Both companies are named in the lawsuit.

The permits were first issued in the 1960s and 1970s. Changes to the legislation and regulations in the intervening years mean these permits should have expired or been renegotiated as updated exploration licences with limited nine-year terms, Miron explained. Instead, the federal natural resources minister has allowed these permits to be indefinitely extended, he said.

According to the notice of application for judicial review, the minister has relied on the moratorium to justify extending the permits rather than renegotiating them. However, the claimants note other permits off B.C.’s coast were previously renegotiated despite the moratorium.

A spokesperson for Chevron Canada said the company would not comment on pending litigation. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the Canada Energy Regulator, there hasn’t been any offshore oil and gas exploration off B.C.’s coast since the early 1970s. Neither has the regulator received any applications or show of interest in exploration in the area, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to The Narwhal.

There was some interest in opening the West Coast to offshore oil and gas exploration from the B.C. Liberal government of the early 2000s, but it’s long since dissipated. 

“The current B.C. government has not made any requests to the federal government to lift their moratorium on offshore oil and gas and is not considering making such a request,” a spokesperson for the provincial ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation said in a statement.

Ian Cameron, the director of communications for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, noted the ongoing moratorium and the federal government’s commitment to protect 25 per cent of Canada’s oceans by 2025 in a statement to The Narwhal

“As the matter is before the courts, we cannot comment further at this time,” he said.

The concern is that the moratorium currently in place isn’t legally binding, which means it can easily be lifted by future governments, Miron said.

International guidelines prohibit oil and gas activity in marine protected areas. Canada’s rules are less defined

The lawsuit is focused on 20 old permits within protected areas, but Miron said there are about 50 other permits off B.C.’s coast as well as a few more modern exploration licences. There used to be more.

In 2018, Shell voluntarily relinquished offshore exploration permits that covered about 50,000 square kilometres off B.C.’s coast. Some of the company’s permits overlapped part of the Scott Islands National Wildlife Area. 

In 2017, the federal government launched a national advisory panel to develop standards for marine protected areas, building on the guidelines established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Both recommended that industrial activities including oil and gas and mining be prohibited from marine protected areas.

In 2019, the federal government committed that such activities would not be allowed in marine protected areas. While the government said economic activities would be assessed on a case-by-case basis in areas protected by other conservation measures, such as Scott Islands National Wildlife Area, it also committed that any areas that allowed oil and gas extraction would not be counted towards international conservation targets.

Offshore oil and gas exploration has already been permitted in a marine refuge on the East Coast. The Northeast Newfoundland Slope Closure contributes about one per cent towards Canada’s goal of protecting 25 per cent of its marine waters by 2025. The refuge prohibits any fishing that would impact the ocean floor, but in January 2021 BP was granted a licence to explore part of the protected area — a necessary first step towards extraction. That exploration also does not require a federal environmental impact assessment, since a broad regional assessment was done for a larger area encompassing the refuge, though this has since been appealed.

Kilian Stehfest, marine conservation specialist with the David Suzuki Foundation, said the organization has reached out to Wilkinson’s advisors to push for the exploration permits off B.C.’s coast to be rescinded, to little avail.

“For us, those places, they’re just too important to leave them at the mercy of moratoria that aren’t really set in law — they can just be overturned if the political winds were to change,” he said.

Climate change, pollution already threaten Scott Islands seabird colonies

“The Government of Canada has a huge stewardship responsibility in the Scott Islands, not only because it’s the largest, most diverse seabird colony of British Columbia,” Hipfner said, adding that a number of seabird species here are listed as at risk either under Canadian law or internationally.

“You don’t need me to tell anybody that oil and seabirds don’t mix,” he said. 

Hipfner pointed to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill off the U.S. coast in the Gulf of Mexico and the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off the coast of Alaska as two well-known examples of what can go wrong. 

Hundreds of thousands of seabirds were killed as a result of the spills. 

Even if offshore oil and gas is never allowed off the coast of B.C., the seabirds that rely on the Scott Islands and surrounding waters have been put at risk from the production and use of fossil fuels.

Take the Cassin’s auklet, as an example. The bird was listed as a species of special concern under the Canadian Species at Risk Act in 2019.

“They breed most successfully in summers where they have access to these coldwater copepods,” Hipfner said. 

Copepods are tiny crustaceans that drift in the water, but warmer temperatures can lead to fewer and poorer quality copepods for the seabirds to feed on. That’s what happened during the 2014-2015 marine heat wave known as The Blob — so-called for the system’s appearance on marine temperature maps — when thousands of Cassin’s auklets died from B.C. to California.

Climate change is not only expected to result in a warmer ocean, but also more extreme events such as the blob.

Both “are likely to have very severe impacts, and not just on Cassin’s auklet, but on the entire marine ecosystem off our coast here,” Hipfner said.

At the same time, seabirds and the waters they rely on may be exposed to massive amounts of waste dumped around the protected Scott Islands, according to a February 2022 report by WWF-Canada.

The report estimated that between 2020 and 2022 almost 65 million litres of greywater, sewage and bilge water was generated as ships travelled through the Scott Islands protected area each year, plus more than 4 million tonnes of scrubber washwater. 

Greywater is any water from sinks, laundry machines, showers and dishwashers. Sewage includes any human or animal waste. Bilge water collects in the ship’s lowest compartment and can contain seawater, oil, coolants, lubricants and drainage from various ship systems such as air conditioners, the report says. Scrubber water, meanwhile, is the liquid waste created by exhaust gas cleaning systems, which prevent sulphur dioxide from being released into the air through a ship’s exhaust system. Dumping this sort of wastewater is still permitted off the coast, including around the Scott Islands, though some can be disposed of at port.

“More waste was created, and therefore potentially dumped, in the Scott Islands protected area than any other protected area included in this assessment,” the report says.

Combined, this waste contains a toxic mix of substances that can be harmful to marine life.

Canada is working to finalize minimum standards for marine protected areas that will prohibit dumping. But a ban won’t automatically apply in places such as the Scott Islands, which are protected by other conservation measures. This leaves the national wildlife area vulnerable to toxic wastewater from marine shipping, the broader threats of climate change and the impermanence of a moratorium on oil and gas development.

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Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has approved a major deepwater production project. 

Guilbeault, who has a long history of environmental activism, had twice put off either approving or rejecting the Bay du Nord project off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. In a decision released Wednesday, April 6, he concluded Bay du Nord is “not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects,” and will, therefore, move ahead.

“The project has undergone a robust federal environmental assessment and scrutiny through every part of Canada’s legislated review process. As the demand for oil and gas falls throughout the coming decades, it will be more important than ever that Canadian projects are running at the best-in-class, low-emissions performance to play a competitive role,” Guilbeault said in a media release on the announcement.

The province describes it as the first deepwater project of its kind in Newfoundland’s offshore.

The Bay du Nord project proposes to extract up to one billion barrels of crude oil from the seabed about 500 kilometres northeast of St. John’s. There, in depths ranging from 300 metres to 1,200 metres, owners Equinor, of Norway, and Husky Energy (now owned by Cenovus), of Canada, hope to operate for up to 30 years.

The federal decision also said that the owners would be expected to comply with 137 conditions during all operations.

Several environmental and Indigenous groups wanted the project rejected. In mid-March, Amy Norman of Labrador Land Protectors told a media briefing hosted by Sierra Club, that approving Bay du Nord would put the country on the wrong trajectory.

“The world is changing and climate change is already here … Already we’re seeing impacts here in Labrador and in Newfoundland: unreliable sea ice, warming temperatures, more frequent storms, unpredictable weather,” Norman said. “It’s already impacting our ways of life and it’s already changing how we live on these lands.”

But industry advocates, along with Newfoundland Premier Andrew Furey, urged the government to give the project the green light, calling it essential to the province’s economy. “​​We remain optimistic that the Government of Canada recognizes the value of the Bay du Nord project. As premier, I have been in contact with the prime minister and he understands the importance of this project to our province,” Furey said in a press release shortly after the latest decision delay.

The attention on Canadian oil and gas has heightened over the last month as Russia’s attack on Ukraine has left much of Europe scrambling for energy sources. Several politicians have used the opportunity to promote homegrown resources as the answer and Bay du Nord, like Alberta’s oilsands projects, has been a focus of the promotion. Furey has, on multiple occasions, stated that the province’s oil supply can play a role in replacing Russian imports.

When asked about Bay du Nord by reporters at a Toronto event in early March, Guilbeault said that, when considering a project, the environmental impact, social implications and economic issues are considered. “What’s happening internationally, we’re not impervious to it, and it would be factored into the analysis,” he said. 

Guilbeault pointed out that even if the project is approved, it won’t produce oil until 2028. “So again, you know, in terms of the short term energy needs of Europe, that’s not a solution.”

When asked how new oil and gas development projects, including Bay du Nord, line up with the government’s emissions reduction plan — which was released in late March, though a cap on oil and gas development is still in the works — Guilbeault responded that it’s not about a blanket yes or no to development.

“I think it’s a mistake to look at one project and use that project to define the entire policy of the government because it doesn’t boil down to one project. Would the project fit under the oil and gas cap? Would it fit under the emissions reduction plan? That’s how I would suggest people look at it.”

Furey sees Bay du Nord as a critical part of the province’s path to net-zero, calling it “the most carbon efficient development of its scale.” Emissions from the project have been estimated by Equinor at eight kilograms per barrel, which is about half of the international average — though neither of those figures factor in emissions from burning that oil, as many critics have pointed out.

Will Bay du Nord cause significant environmental effects?

Late in the day on March 4, Guilbeault extended the deadline for his decision on Bay du Nord by an additional 40 days to determine the potential environmental impacts of the project, according to the extension announcement. At the time, the government also said that the decision would be informed by the Impact Assessment Agency’s environmental assessment report of the project from August 2021. The agency had concluded that, with mitigation measures in place, Bay du Nord is unlikely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.

“The federal government concurs with the recommendation of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada,” Guilbeault said in the media release announcing his decision. “As a result, the Bay du Nord Development Project may proceed, subject to some of the strongest environmental conditions ever, including the historic requirement for an oil and gas project to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”

Prior to its approval, Gretchen Fitzgerald, national programs director with Sierra Club Canada, noted that there are a number of red flags she sees with the project. For example, she said that the production estimates have grown from 300,000 barrels to one billion since the project was first pitched and that there are also questions about whether the government’s decision is based on sound scientific advice.

The deep-sea drilling project falls east of Newfoundland and Labrador where four offshore oil and gas projects currently operate. Bay du Nord has been the subject of controversy, as has a 2020 regional assessment on offshore exploration drilling in the area: that led to the exclusion of exploration projects — during which companies drill wells to determine the feasibility and value of long-term projects — in the area from requiring the sort of seal of approval Bay du Nord is waiting on from Guilbeault. 

Both the regional assessment and Bay du Nord have been mired in concerns around whether science — specifically scientific evidence from Fisheries and Oceans Canada — is being outflanked by the province’s push for oil and gas.

In late January, CBC reported on a leaked letter from the union representing Fisheries and Oceans scientists in Newfoundland and Labrador, which outlined its members’ concerns about how politicians and oil and gas industry lobbyists were allegedly interfering with the advice from scientists and scientific practices at the department. It noted several instances of interference, including in a report on mitigating the impacts of oil and gas exploration on corals and sponges. 

Also in January, a critical report from Fisheries and Oceans Canada was released publicly a full two years after it was written. The report is a review of Equinor’s draft environmental impact statement for Bay du Nord, and states that Fisheries Department scientists found several cases where information was mischaracterized and relevant research was left out. Baseline information, it said, was incomplete and outdated for nearly all chapters reviewed.

It continued that this led to an unreliable assessment and “inappropriate conclusions.”

“In its current form, and until the problems identified in this report are addressed, the [environmental impact statement] is not considered a reliable source of information for decision-making processes,” the report stated.

Equinor told The Narwhal in an email that as part of the project’s technical review process, the company had thoroughly responded to questions from federal departments and agencies. It also said that it had revised its environmental impact statement in response to feedback. 

Jaclyn Sauvé, spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency, also noted in an email to The Narwhal, prior to the decision, that the Fisheries and Oceans report reflected the findings of department scientists in 2019 and did shape the department’s advice to the agency. While the report itself was not submitted to the agency or Equinor, Sauvé said that the information was shared through workshops, conversations, discussions and in-depth technical reviews. 

Equinor submitted its final environmental impact statement in July 2020. According to the Impact Assessment Agency, the final statement included an additional round of reviews by federal departments, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

The agency also said that the final statement was informed by input from Indigenous groups and the public. But notes from a meeting between the agency and various Indigenous groups in August 2020, after the final statement was submitted, includes a participant question on why Indigenous groups were consulted after Equinor had already received significant input from the government. The questioner stated that this made the assessment process for Bay du Nord different from other similar projects. “This was a missed opportunity especially given the agency’s commitment to early engagement of Indigenous groups,” the question reads.

The agency responded that the technical review of the draft by federal authorities meant that Equinor developed a final statement that was “sufficient for public and Indigenous comment.” It continued that additional requirements could still be given to Equinor following any comments provided by Indigenous groups and the public, with the final statement not yet approved.

At that August meeting, the agency also suggested that a tight timeline was part of the reason the assessment process was different than in the past, telling the questioner that it “committed to a shorter than usual assessment period” of 300 days rather than 365 days, which would kick off once the final environmental impact statement was accepted.

That confirmation that its final statement had been accepted came in late 2020, Equinor spokesperson Alex Collins wrote in an email response to The Narwhal. That was followed by the Impact Assessment Agency’s environmental assessment report for Bay du Nord in August 2021, which laid out the process so far in reviewing the project, including concerns brought up by Indigenous groups, environmental organizations and federal agencies, such as Fisheries and Oceans.

Scientists’ concerns over Bay du Nord remain unaddressed 

The release of the 2019 Fisheries and Oceans report in early 2022, shortly before Guilbeault was due to make a decision, seemingly stirred up tension.

Collins said Equinor was disappointed to see the report published without the full context of the review process, noting that between the time the report was finished and when it was published, Equinor fully responded to all questions and information requests from the government in order to complete its final environmental impact statement.

Soon after the report was released, Fisheries and Oceans Canada regional director for Newfoundland and Labrador, Tony Blanchard wrote to the Impact Assessment Agency to clarify the statements in the report, noting that it was published “after some internal delays.” 

“While the report was published in January 2022, it reflects information available in 2019 and does not provide comments on subsequent information provided during the environmental assessment process,” he wrote on Feb. 2.

He continued that the department’s outstanding concerns have been addressed.

However, the environmental organization Stand.earth commissioned environmental lawyer Shelley Kath to dig into the Fisheries and Oceans report, comparing the recommendations in it to Equinor’s final environmental impact statement. In the vast majority of cases, she found that concerns raised by scientists were not addressed.

An obvious one, she points out, is that the largest oil spill in Newfoundland and Labrador’s history wasn’t mentioned in a discussion of historical spills: a 250,000-litre spill in 2018 from the SeaRose Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading vessel. That’s the same type of vessel proposed for use on Bay du Nord, and it was operated by Husky Energy (now Cenovus) — Equinor’s partner on the Bay du Nord project. Despite this omission being raised by Fisheries scientists, the SeaRose spill is not mentioned in Equinor’s final statement.

“If we’re not even learning from massive mistakes like that, and information of what those impacts were at the time is not incorporated going forward, what does that say?” Fitzgerald, of Sierra Club, said. “It’s actually actively ignored, what does that say?”

The final statement also failed to address a concern brought forward by Fisheries scientists on the lack of modeling around the release of hydrocarbon gas, such as methane, in the case of a spill. 

“This huge lacuna was not rectified in the final [environmental impact statement] and this means that Equinor has ignored a key lesson of Deepwater Horizon,” Kath wrote in her analysis, referring to the 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion of that BP rig illustrated that, along with oil, underwater blowouts release methane that reduces oxygen levels in the water — exacerbating a process already underway due to climate change.

Kath said that it was hard for her to discern whether the final environmental impact statement was amended to follow advice from the Fisheries report, since the draft statement was never publicly released. She could only compare the Fisheries and Oceans report with Equinor’s final environmental impact statement, and note what was left out.

But from that exercise, she said, “I didn’t notice any places where the recommendations were followed. I did notice, sadly, one instance where a statement actually was changed … but changed for the worse.”

In a section involving ship strikes with marine mammals, the Fisheries report quoted the draft environmental impact statement as suggesting that given the low speed of vessels, “the potential for ship strikes is considered low.” Fisheries scientists responded that it had received several reports of vessels striking whales in transit to or from offshore facilities, as well as reports of a number of dead whales sighted with no evidence of fishing net entanglement, suggesting that being struck was likely also their cause of death. The fisheries report suggested mitigation measures such as onboard observers and communication between vessels about any marine mammal sightings.

Kath found that Equinor’s statement on vessel strikes in the final mostly reads the same, word for word as what Fisheries objected to — up until the end, when it’s amended from the risk being “considered low” to say “the potential for ship strikes is considered very low and not considered an effect.”

“Whether it’s DFO upper management or the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, someone needs to show their work,” Kath told The Narwhal about Equinor’s impact statement passing an environmental assessment. “They need to show us how these many, many, many issues have been addressed, if they indeed have been addressed.”

When asked for a paper trail or any evidence of how various concerns were addressed, Fisheries and Oceans Canada declined to comment and referred all questions on Bay du Nord to the Impact Assessment Agency. 

For its part, the Impact Assessment Agency covers some technical recommendations under the project conditions it sets out in its environmental assessment, rather than requiring changes to Equinor’s environmental impact statement.

The agency stated in its assessment that Equinor had decided there was no need for dedicated onboard observers, a mitigation measure suggested by Fisheries scientists as well as Miawpukek First Nation in southern Newfoundland. Instead, vessels would use dedicated shipping lanes where available, and slow down if a sea turtle or marine mammal was detected. This was enough mitigation, the agency wrote, to ensure that Bay du Nord was unlikely to cause significant adverse effects to marine mammals or sea turtles. Its proposed conditions mirror the mitigations proposed by Equinor.

A common thread throughout the agency’s report is that, while concerns were raised by various groups, there is limited information available. A lack of baseline information was brought up both by Fisheries and Oceans scientists and Indigenous groups that participated in the project review. 

It’s a major problem for Newfoundland’s offshore industry in general, said Susanna Fuller, vice-president of operations and projects for marine conservation organization Oceans North. She told The Narwhal that a 2016 literature review examining impacts of oil and gas operations on marine environments didn’t even mention the offshore industry in Newfoundland and Labrador or Nova Scotia, simply because there is virtually no peer-reviewed literature available. 

“There are two papers that were done a long time ago by a scientist who now works at (the provincial offshore petroleum board), but there is no ongoing look at actual impacts,” Fuller said.

And even the scarce scientific evidence available isn’t necessarily being listened to, said Fitzgerald, who grew up in Newfoundland and has a background in marine biology. “There has been a long history here of both the community’s concerns being ignored, fishery concerns being ignored and of course, impact on whales and other species being downplayed or ignored,” she said. 

Economic stability and environmental sustainability can exist in tandem, Fuller said, through following good scientific advice rather than prioritizing industry. It’s a lesson she said should have been learned, considering that Newfoundland’s cod industry collapsed as a result of overfishing.

“I keep thinking it’s just the colony of unrequited dreams,” she said. “You see these things happen again every few decades in Newfoundland, where there’s so much fear of losing economic benefit, that they lose the full economic benefits: mining went that way, cod went that way.”

— With files from Emma McIntosh

Updated on Apr. 6 at 7:14 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to clarify that Husky Energy was acquired by Cenovus Energy, meaning Cenovus is now Equinor’s partner in the Bay du Nord project.

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For years, Jean-Charles Piétacho has been growing increasingly worried about the state of the planet’s oceans and whether they can continue to sustain traditions that have lasted for generations.

Piétacho is chief of the Conseil des Innu de Ekuanitshit, which lies on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, just above Anticosti Island, and is also known as Mingan.

The Innu say they have used and occupied the estuary and the gulf as well as its north shore since time immemorial. They say their relationship with Uinipek (the sea), the source of life, is fundamental for their maritime people who continue to exercise their ancestral rights, notably the gathering of marine resources for social, ceremonial purposes and for sustenance.

But Piétacho also believes the ocean represents much more than that for everyone.

“We all need the quality of water that was given by the Creator,” Piétacho told The Narwhal in an interview.

Chief Jean-Charles Piétacho of the Conseil des Innu de Ekuanitshit says new rules permitting exploration in Newfoundland’s offshore could have damaging impacts on his community on the north shore of the St. Lawrence. Photo: Francis Vachon / The Canadian Press

His community of 650 people is worried about the threat posed by oil and gas. The industry is lobbying for more exploration, while a new policy allows certain offshore exploration projects to be approved without adequate federal oversight, nor consultation with affected First Nations.

The Innu and their allies allege that a trove of more than 3,000 pages of recently released federal documents reveal how federal and provincial cabinet ministers rigged a regional study that was supposed to examine the safety of oil and gas exploration in an area off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. They say the documents show that the plan from the outset was to reduce federal oversight and allow more drilling projects to proceed, favouring industry interests over scientific evidence.

In effect, companies can now do seismic testing, install drilling platforms or drill wells into an area of the seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean without getting approval from the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. It’s a win for industry which, along with the province, had argued federal assessments were an obstacle to development in a sector that’s critical to Newfoundland and Labrador’s economy. 

Piétacho’s community is more than 1,000 kilometres away from this area off the coast of Newfoundland, but a dwindling number of Atlantic salmon swim the route between the two every year.

Atlantic salmon, which the Innu call ushashameku, are listed as endangered around Anticosti Island and of special concern along the North Shore and further down the St. Lawrence River. Salmon enter the river and Bay of Fundy to lay eggs; their young, known as smolt, swim up the river and out of the bay, migrating through the Atlantic and North Atlantic. Fishing ushashameku is particularly important to the Innu and represents a way of life based on spirituality and respect.

Along with valuing the ocean’s cultural significance, Piétacho said, his nation operates a handful of commercial fishing boats, catching Atlantic salmon, crab, lobster and scallops and creating local jobs.

The health of these waters is critical to the people who rely on them.

It’s the reason the Innu of Ekuanitshit intervened in a 2021 court case brought forward by the environmental law charity Ecojustice, representing Sierra Club Canada Foundation, World Wildlife Fund of Canada and Ecology Action Centre. The complainants wanted a judicial review of what they call a “flawed” process that led to this weakened oversight.

In December, Justice Richard Bell denied the judicial review. Ecojustice and the three environmental organizations have appealed this decision. And now, the nearly 3,000 pages of documents released through the court case give a behind-the-scenes look at what happened as the Trudeau government lifted the requirement for federal environmental assessments of oil and gas exploration in a portion of Newfoundland’s offshore — at a time when it told the public it was improving oversight. 

A campaign promise and a new approach to offshore oil and gas exploration east of Newfoundland

Criticizing former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government for watering down the longstanding Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, Justin Trudeau headed into the 2015 election with a campaign promise to improve federal oversight of major projects and restore public trust in federal regulatory reviews.

As prime minister, Trudeau and his Liberal government made good on this promise with the Impact Assessment Act, which came into force in 2019. The Act was meant to strengthen environmental assessments, with a particular emphasis on regional assessments. Studies of existing and anticipated projects are meant to go beyond “project-focused impact assessments to understand the regional context and provide more comprehensive analyses to help inform … future impact assessment decisions,” said Nancy Macdonald, spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, in an email to The Narwhal.

The act has been challenged in court by industry-friendly politicians who say it infringes on provincial jurisdiction. Environmentalists have said that, while it made some much needed improvements, gaps remain. But, in general, the act is seen as an environmental step forward.

In April 2019, as part of a plan to promote offshore drilling, federal and provincial cabinet ministers announced the creation of the Regional Assessment Committee, saying they had appointed five people to study the regional implications of drilling for new oil deposits east of Newfoundland. At 735,000 square kilometres, the study area is larger than Alberta, stretching from the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland to beyond the southern tip of Nova Scotia — though well off its eastern coastline. There are already four oil-producing projects within the area, with a fifth proposed. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is due to make a decision on the controversial Bay du Nord deep-sea drilling project by April 13.

The Regional Assessment Committee was led by co-chairs Garth Bangay, an environmental consultant and previous program manager under Environment Canada, and Wes Foote, an engineer and former deputy minister of Petroleum Development under the Newfoundland government, as well as a board member of the Canada-Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board. At the time the committee was established, the government said it would be tasked with writing a report providing advice on how to make the licensing process more efficient for new exploratory drilling projects in the area while also protecting the environment. 

This look at Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore exploration is the first regional assessment conducted under both the Impact Assessment Act and the previous assessment act. “It is precedent setting,” said Sigrid Kuehnemund, vice-president wildlife and industry with WWF-Canada, adding that’s part of the reason it was so critical it be done properly. Based in St. John’s, Kuehnemund said, “It sets the bar for the conduct of all future regional assessments.”

She was among those in the environmental movement who had hopes that the committee would engage the public, address cumulative impacts of development and identify areas that needed protection within the regional assessment area.

But the documents, released through the court battle, show numerous instances in which some federal officials appear to have influenced the Regional Assessment Committee’s review and recommendations to ensure they favoured the industry’s desire to get faster approvals with less oversight.

One example is a letter signed in December 2019 by Seamus O’Regan, who at the time was the federal minister of natural resources. He sent the letter in response to a request from the committee for more time to complete its work.

In the letter — which he also sent to the federal environment minister, the Newfoundland and Labrador premier and the provincial natural resources minister — O’Regan wrote that in order to ensure Newfoundland and Labrador would support the passing of the Impact Assessment Act, the Trudeau government had made a public promise to “exempt” exploratory drilling from federal review.

The province has its own publicized goal of seeing 100 new wells drilled in Newfoundland’s offshore by 2030 and saw regulatory uncertainty and federal climate change legislation as two major barriers.

O’Regan is Member of Parliament for Newfoundland’s riding of St. John’s South—Mount Pearl, as well as the current minister of labour. In that December 2019 letter, he agreed that the government needed to grant an extension to the Regional Assessment Committee’s deadline — provided it didn’t jeopardize industry plans to spend more than $7 billion on oil and gas exploration in deep water.

With an extension granted, O’Regan said the Regional Assessment Committee would be able to complete consultations, including with Indigenous groups, and prepare its final report. “However, the extension must not put at risk the commitment to have a ministerial regulation in place by the end of April 2020 to exempt exploratory drilling activities under the Impact Assessment Act,” the letter reads. 

O’Regan’s office declined a request for comment from The Narwhal due to the appeal currently before the court. The provincial Department of Industry, Energy and Technology denied a request for an interview for the same reason.

The office of federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault referred questions to the Impact Assessment Agency, as did his department, Environment and Climate Change Canada.

After the federal government agreed to extend the review, the committee submitted its draft report in January 2020, seeking feedback from stakeholders.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Oil and Gas Industries Association was among those providing comments in an April 2020 submission regarding the industry’s exemption from federal assessment when doing explorations. It said it believes “that for the offshore oil and gas industry to continue to be successful it must be globally competitive, and this must include regulatory processes. Environmental reviews can be undertaken in a fashion that protects the environment but allows economic activity to occur in [a] timely manner.”

Macdonald, with the Impact Assessment Agency, told The Narwhal, that recognizing the provincial government’s interest in the exemption, “the Government of Canada was happy to work with them through an agreement on a regional assessment with the regulatory exemption as a potential outcome.”

The potential for other outcomes than a blanket exemption is what Ecojustice lawyer Ian Miron said kept his clients at the table.

The court documents also include government notes from a meeting in May 2019 between the Regional Assessment Committee and fisheries groups and environmental organizations — including the parties to the 2021 lawsuit. The notes show that participants were concerned that the overarching regional assessment would be used to facilitate further drilling by replacing the need for detailed, project-specific assessments.

According to the notes, the Regional Assessment Committee responded in the meeting that the intention was to “increase efficiency” in the environmental assessment process and bring new information to the table to make the best decisions possible. “The purpose was not to facilitate exploratory drilling,” the committee stated.

Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board now primary oversight for new oil and gas projects

Chief Piétacho warns that the reduced oversight may lead to tragedy for local marine life in the event of an accident.

He fears it could be worse than the blowout of an exploratory well in the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Deepwater’s failed well was drilled below 1,500 metres of water in the gulf. While some areas of Newfoundland’s eastern offshore wells are far shallower, others reach comparable deep-sea depths — the Bay du Nord project, for example, is eyeing depths between 1,000 and 1,200 metres. The Bay du Nord project has already completed some exploratory drilling and may soon begin production, if approved by the federal government.

In its review of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a national commission reporting to the president of the United States noted that “deepwater drilling brings new risks, not yet completely addressed by the reviews of where it is safe to drill, what could go wrong, and how to respond if something does go awry.”Several oil spills in Newfoundland’s offshore in recent years have had experts calling for increased regulatory oversight of the industry. In particular, the worst spill in the province’s history saw the release of 250,000 litres of crude oil from a flowline to Husky Energy’s SeaRose vessel — part of the White Rose project — as it restarted production during a storm.

Although the federal government has removed requirements for federal assessments of offshore exploration in the region, Fisheries and Oceans Canada still has the power to review aspects of new exploration projects that impact fish, fish habitat or species at risk, to ensure mitigations are in place. 

And projects within the regional assessment area will still be submitted to a review by the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, which is jointly managed by the Canadian and Newfoundland and Labrador governments, and which Regional Assessment Committee co-chair Foote sits on the board of. The offshore petroleum board’s role is to ensure that companies adhere to any conditions set out by the regional assessment. 

Lesley Ridout, a board spokesperson, said that it publicizes all expressions of interest in new exploration licences in Newfoundland’s offshore. “When we do so, Indigenous groups, the public and stakeholders are welcome to submit comments for consideration on any portion of our land tenure process, as stated in each news release, announcing any call for nominations or call for bids,” Ridout said. 

Two industry groups, the Newfoundland Oil and Gas Industries Association and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, emphasized the importance of the regulatory role played by the offshore petroleum board.

“All proposed offshore projects will continue to go through one of the most rigorous review processes in the world,” wrote Paul Barnes, director of Atlantic Canada and Arctic for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, in an emailed statement. “The regional assessment creates a more efficient process and will ensure the federal Impact Assessment is able to focus on the most important project reviews while relying on the world-class expertise of the offshore petroleum board.”

Public servants expressed concerns about the quality of regional assessment and consideration of risks to human health 

While the documents released as part of the Ecojustice case show how senior government officials like O’Regan advocated for reducing federal oversight of offshore oil exploration, they also reveal that some public servants expressed concerns about the quality of the Regional Assessment Committee’s work.

For example, officials at Health Canada with expertise on environmental assessments said the Regional Assessment Committee’s recommendations failed to address the potential dangers of chemical mixtures deployed by industry to disperse spills.

“Therefore, in the event of a spill in which dispersants are used, there would not be a comprehensive understanding of what potential contaminants may be present that could impact the food chain and potentially pose a risk to human health,” wrote a Health Canada environmental assessment specialist in a February 2020 email to a colleague at the Impact Assessment Agency.

The federal health department recommended that companies be required to proactively disclose the chemicals used in dispersants, which are otherwise proprietary, so that scientists can do sampling to review baseline conditions and any changes in the presence of these substances in the ecosystem. Without knowing which contaminants are involved, Health Canada noted their ability to respond to contaminants that have been added is significantly limited.

Despite Health Canada’s recommendations, the Regional Assessment Committee recommended only that baseline conditions and monitoring take place.

The email thread shows that a manager from the Impact Assessment Agency responded that he agreed with Health Canada and had also pointed out the oversight to the committee, “but this is where they landed and what they ended up going with.”

Macdonald, the agency spokesperson, said that Health Canada’s input helped inform the recommendations made by the Regional Assessment Committee. She noted that the potential effects of contaminants, both from planned oil and gas activities and in the case of a spill and cleanup, are considered in several places in the committee’s final report, including risks, mitigation measures and spill response planning.

However, the report does not mention requiring companies to disclose a list of potential contaminants used in dispersants.

In another instance, Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat concluded that some of the Regional Assessment Committee’s initial work was neither reliable, nor credible after scientists at the federal department reviewed sections of a draft report focused on sensitive areas and species in the marine ecosystem, including plankton, invertebrates, finfish, marine mammals and sea turtles.

The federal department also said after concluding its review in the fall of 2019 that it found “multiple mischaracterizations and/or omissions of available research from the referenced literature” and that “reported baseline information was incomplete and outdated” in most of the sections it was allowed to review. 

In an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal, Fisheries and Oceans Canada said, “the committee made substantial additions and revisions to the initial draft” sections that it reviewed, and that its comments and revisions were included in the final report. 

Fisheries and Oceans also said that the federal government had committed to regularly reviewing and updating the regional assessment as new science and data become available, which the department would contribute to. 

However, Fisheries and Oceans has come under fire itself recently for how its scientific advice is being tampered with — including through the regional assessment process. 

In late January, CBC reported on a leaked letter from the union representing Fisheries and Oceans scientists in Newfoundland and Labrador, which outlined its members’ concerns about breaches of the department’s scientific integrity policy due to the influence of industry lobbyists, department leaders and politicians. The letter stated that an investigation by the Office of the Ombuds into a complaint over the regional assessment process “did not follow due process and left members feeling that their complaints were not heard or believed.”

While the Regional Assessment Committee brushed aside some expert advice on its own, the court documents also show at least one instance when a public servant from Natural Resources Canada appears to have pressured the committee to change recommendations that might slow down or prevent oil and gas exploration.

In November 2019, before the committee’s draft recommendations were released to the public, the official emailed a list of concerns to the Impact Assessment Agency.

One of those concerns related to a recommendation that would require a federal review of any proposals in sensitive designated conservation areas, such as the Northeast Newfoundland Slope marine refuge, an area about the size of Nova Scotia that is closed off from commercial fishing due to its abundance of slow-growing cold-water corals and sponges, which provide habitat for numerous species. Protecting the area is a long-standing concern of several of the stakeholder groups, including the environmental organizations represented by Ecojustice.

The Natural Resources official noted that this proposal “could result in few exploratory projects being exempt” from federal oversight, running counter to the Trudeau government’s commitments to the province.

And indeed, the need for a review is not included in the Regional Assessment Committee’s final report, which reads that exploration drilling within marine refuges or certain fisheries “should be contingent on the operator demonstrating that any risks to intended biodiversity/conservation outcomes of that area will be avoided or mitigated.” This runs counter to the federal government’s inclusion of the Northeast Newfoundland Slope in a list of areas relevant towards meeting its goal of 25 per cent protection of Canada’s oceans by 2025 and 30 per cent protection by 2030. At about 55,000 square kilometres, it accounts for about one per cent of the government’s current level of just under 14 per cent protected marine area.

Ecojustice lawyer Miron said the original recommendation was never disclosed to stakeholders and his clients only learned it had been changed after the government disclosed its records through the court case.

Macdonald, from the Impact Assessment Agency, said, “The report and recommendations underwent several iterations,” based on analysis and engagement throughout the drafting process.

Justice Bell sided with the agency in his ruling, noting “There was nothing untoward in the committee consulting [Natural Resources Canada], a party to the agreement.” 

‘The decisions are already made’: Innu chief says regional assessment outcome was decided from the start

Chief Piétacho also said that the federal government failed to meaningfully consult First Nations during the regional assessment process, particularly about the implications of removing substantial federal oversight on new oil and gas projects.

In its 2019 request for an extension, the Regional Assessment Committee said that, while it was making progress, it believed that “building trust with Indigenous groups” was “not a fast-paced process.”

When asked about those comments by the committee, Piétacho told The Narwhal that government officials lost the trust of First Nations years ago based on Canada’s historical and current treatment of Indigenous communities.

“I know from experience, the decisions are already made and after that they come tell us that they are coming to consult us on a project,” he said.

Previously, Piétacho had noted in a February 2020 letter to the Impact Assessment Agency, that members of the Regional Assessment Committee would often provide dates and topics of meetings “at the last minute, giving us little time to prepare to contribute in a significant manner or even just to simply participate.”

Macdonald, with the Impact Assessment Agency, said the agency prioritizes “building long-term partnerships with Indigenous communities and people. Sustaining these relationships over the long term is vital for the success of assessments.”

She added that the agency’s Indigenous Advisory Committee as well as several programs are geared towards building that relationship and fostering trust. That includes the Indigenous Capacity Support Program which works to increase capacity for Indigenous Peoples to meaningfully participate in assessments.

Citing over 100 workshops and technical meetings and $436,000 in participant funding for Indigenous groups and other stakeholders, Macdonald called the regional assessment process fair, open and inclusive.

She listed literature reviews on the potential effects of exploratory drilling and initial drafts of potential recommendations as examples of information provided to Indigenous people in advance. “Some of these documents were provided nearly two months before their draft versions were released for a 30-day public review period,” she wrote in an emailed response.

Piétacho wrote in his February 2020 letter that the committee’s draft report lacked clarity, was rushed and inadequate, and was based on a vision of promoting offshore oil and gas development instead of promoting the protection of the ocean.

“It is concerning that, as the committee notes, too often the scientific expertise of the federal government was not available to support the assessment,” he said, in the letter, dated Feb. 21, 2020.

Just over a week later, the regional assessment report on oil and gas exploration in Newfoundland’s offshore was submitted to then-environment minister Wilkinson.

In their submission letter to Wilkinson, the committee’s co-chairs emphasized how the tight timeline hindered their work. One challenge this presented, they wrote, was limiting “the opportunities for others to contribute. Another was gaining the support of all the parties who should have been available to facilitate our work resulting in significant, additional effort to access important expertise.”

Nonetheless, four days later, on March 4, 2020, the final report was released to the public. On that same day the Impact Assessment Agency put out a discussion paper on the regulation exempting exploration drilling in Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore from project-specific assessment. 

That April, Piétacho sent another letter to then-environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson, criticizing the proposed regulation. He wrote that it would eliminate the consultation stage with Indigenous people about whether to approve any future exploratory drilling.

The letter also noted that even before the committee’s draft study was released, the government had published a notice predicting that the report would be used to introduce an exemption on federal reviews for exploratory drilling permits.

“Not only is the process hasty and seems to indicate bias for production of hydrocarbons, it fails to really take into account the rights of Indigenous peoples,” Piétacho wrote.

As Piétacho expected, the exemption regulation was enacted on June 4, 2020.

Piétacho told the Narwhal that much is now at stake, for First Nations Rights, but also for everyone else.

“I’m concerned and I’ve taken on this file on behalf of the Innu Nation to defend our principles and dreams,” Piétacho told The Narwhal. “I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing it for future generations.

With files from Mike De Souza.

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The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) issued a stark warning in a report released this week that federal protections for several ocean conservation areas are too weak to meet their goals of preserving or restoring marine biodiversity.

“Our oceans are in trouble,” said Alex Barron, the national director of CPAWS’ ocean program. 

In the face of declining fisheries, a growing number of at-risk species and habitat loss, marine protected areas (MPAs) are “one of the most effective conservation tools we have,” she said.

“They’re really equivalent to parks on land,” said Natalie Ban, an environmental studies professor at the University of Victoria and one of more than 40 international experts who contributed to the development of the MPA guide, a framework published in the journal Science in September that can be used to evaluate, strengthen and plan marine protected area regulations.

These marine protected areas can serve as a vital refuge for marine life from myriad threats, but only with strong protections and effective management, Barron said.

According to the federal government, almost 14 per cent of Canada’s marine and coastal areas are protected through various measures, which means the country has exceeded its target under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to protect 10 per cent of its oceans by 2020. Now, Ottawa is working towards a new target of protecting 25 per cent of its oceans by 2025 and 30 per cent by 2030.

However, the new CPAWS assessment, which was based on the marine protected areas guide, found that of 17 marine areas currently protected by either Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Parks Canada or Environment and Climate Change Canada, “seven MPAs are strongly protected, eight are weakly protected and two are incompatible with biodiversity conservation.” 

The seven marine protected areas that are considered strongly protected account for just 0.4 per cent of Canada’s oceans, the report found.

Concerns raised about protections for B.C.’s Scott Islands marine National Wildlife Area 

One of the marine protected areas of particular concern is the Scott Islands marine National Wildlife Area, where CPAWS found the level of protection to be “incompatible with biodiversity conservation.”

Established by Environment and Climate Change Canada under the Canada Wildlife Act in 2018, the MPA covers 11,546 square kilometres of ocean surrounding the five Scott Islands off the north coast of Vancouver Island.

Between five and 10 million migratory birds, including the short-tailed Albatross and other species at risk, travel to the region each year to feed, Environment and Climate Change Canada notes on its website. 

According to the CPAWS report, there is a moratorium on oil and gas activities in the Scott Islands protected area, but those activities are not specifically banned under the marine protected area’s regulations — leaving “a worrying gap in protections” if the moratorium were ever overturned. 

That’s also the case in two other marine protected areas — The Gully, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and Tarium Niryutait, off the Yukon and Northwest Territories — according to the report.

The government’s regulatory impact analysis statement for Scott Islands, published in 2018 and reviewed by CPAWS as part of its assessment, noted that as of 2018 four companies held 36 oil and gas exploration permits and one licence that could affect the protected area if exploration were ever allowed to proceed. 

“However, they would have to demonstrate that the impacts of their proposed activity would not compromise the conservation of the area,” the statement notes.

Bottom trawling, a fishing practice in which a net is dragged along the ocean floor, is also allowed in the Scott Islands protected area, according to the CPAWS report. 

“Canada itself says that there are four key uses that are not compatible with protection in the ocean, four key industrial activities: oil and gas, mining, dumping and bottom trawling,” Ban said. 

“So, it’s clearly a gap.” 

Canada has minimum protection standards, now it needs to implement them

In the spring of 2019, the federal government announced it would establish minimum protection standards for all new marine protected areas based on advice from the national advisory panel on marine protected area standards.

Moving forward, the government committed that oil and gas activities, mining, dumping and bottom trawling would be banned in all new federal marine protected areas. It also promised to consider adopting those minimum standards for existing protected areas as their management plans came up for review.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions and the newly appointed minister for the department, Joyce Murray, was not available for an interview by publication.

Adopting even the minimum standards across existing marine protected areas would increase the level of protection for several sites, Barron said. 

According to the report, by regulating the minimum standards across all 17 existing marine protected areas, nine (rather than seven) would be considered strongly protected, eight would be weakly protected and none would be considered incompatible with biodiversity conservation.

Without meaningful protections, Ban warned that marine protected areas risk being nothing more than “paper parks” — simply “lines on a map that either don’t have any meaningful regulations or (the regulations) aren’t enforced at all.”

Barron said the federal government is working towards implementation of those minimum standards, a process that involves defining what exactly is covered under those four industrial activities.

That’s “really important for things like dumping, which is quite a broad activity,” she explained.

In a country like Canada where multiple federal agencies have a role to play in ocean governance, the process can get complicated quickly, she said.

But “we’re pushing the government to get moving as quickly as possible,” Barron said.

And in the meantime, the CPAWS report says that any marine protected area that allows bottom trawling, and oil and gas or mineral activities should not be counted towards Canada’s ocean conservation targets.

Canada urged to replicate examples of ‘really good MPAs’ as it works to meet targets

“The most pressing thing is getting the minimum protection standards in place for future sites and then starting to look at existing MPAs and how we can improve them to be consistent with the minimum protection standards,” Barron said.

Several of the existing sites are overdue for management reviews, she noted, which is the process through which the government said it would consider adopting the minimum standards.

Both Ban and Barron said they’d like to see the federal government use the marine protected area guide that informed CPAWS’ analysis as a measure to assess the level of protection for marine protected areas.

Barron noted there are also “some really, really good MPAs in Canada,” including the SGaan Kinghlas-Bowie Seamount in B.C. and the Laurentian Channel off the southwest coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

“So, we have examples where we’ve done it right and we’d like to see Canada look at those examples and look to replicate those as we push for 30 per cent” protection by 2030, she said.

There are also “some really strong examples of Indigenous leadership on MPAs,” Barron said, noting Gwaii Haanas for instance.

“This is something that we recognize is going to be really, really important moving forward and in ensuring that MPAs are not only formally protected, but also well managed and benefitting local communities and Indigenous communities,” she said.

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At first glance, northwest B.C. is a vast wild landscape home to big forests, even bigger mountains and rich river systems that cut through the landscape. But looking closer, those forests are criss-crossed with logging roads and punctuated with massive clearcuts. Many mountains are mined for the minerals within and the watersheds are continually threatened by industrial development. Where the rivers meet the ocean, massive freight ships come and go, delivering goods from overseas and carrying materials like grain, lumber, coal and wood pellets across the Pacific.

The region is subject to a seemingly never-ending stream of proposals for mines, export facilities, processing plants and other industrial developments. The question is: can the ecosystem as a whole sustain all of these projects?  

Doing a regional assessment that looks at the cumulative impacts of all past, present and future projects on the landscape could help answer that question. And when B.C.’s updated Environmental Assessment Act came into force in 2019, one of the big changes was adding a provision that allows the minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy to order regional assessments and use those assessments to help determine whether or not individual projects should go ahead. The minister will be able to enter into agreements with other agencies or jurisdictions, including Indigenous nations, to develop, undertake and implement a regional assessment.

Another provision allows the minister to pause the environmental assessment process for an individual project while a regional assessment is conducted. 

The B.C. Environmental Assessment Office is working on establishing regulations that will determine what is involved in a regional assessment, how it’s done and what happens after, but due to the pandemic, it is behind schedule. As a result, the province has yet to conduct its first regional assessment.

No one from the Ministry of Environment was able to speak with The Narwhal for this story because government communications are limited to public health and safety information and statutory requirements during the election period and until the final results of the election are determined.

Pat Moss, director of Northwest Institute, said it’s vital to consider the cumulative impacts of multiple projects given all the industrial development in northwest B.C.

“Maybe the impacts of one particular project are not so huge, but when you add them all together, it is dramatic.”

She said the combined effects of the proposed Vopak fuel export terminal, proposed Prince Rupert port expansions and proposed Telkwa Coal mine, not to mention all the other development projects on the table, would significantly alter the landscape. 

Vopak Canada has a 30 per cent stake in Canada’s first propane export facility, the Ridley Island Propane Export Terminal, and is hoping to expand that interest with the proposed Vopak Pacific Canada facility. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority

Regional assessments could protect ecosystems, strengthen public and Indigenous participation

The purpose of doing a regional assessment is to get a clear picture of all existing impacts on habitat, watersheds, species and communities and create a strategy for managing the cumulative impacts of development. Armed with the knowledge of what’s out there and what’s at stake, a big-picture strategy can then be used to establish requirements for future projects.

Used correctly, regional assessments could strengthen public and Indigenous participation in resource development, according to Gavin Smith, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law. For example, he said it would have been much easier for people to participate in one regional assessment rather than the many environmental assessments for LNG projects in the region in recent years. 

“It wasn’t humanly possible to participate in that number of assessments,” he said. “I don’t think that we can discount how harmful that is. People feel totally shut out by virtue of the fact that our laws have not created a regime where we’re actually looking at the big picture.”

Regional assessments will look at the cumulative impact of industrial development in a region on vulnerable species such as sockeye salmon. Photo: J Armstrong / University of Washington

But Smith said the legislation doesn’t define when regional assessments must be done or stipulate that the public can formally request they be done. “Simply enabling something in law does not mean it will happen in the real world,” he said.

He also expressed concern about the wording of the legislation. It says the minister must “consider” the results of a regional assessment when making a final decision on an individual project, which means the project could still be approved even if it would contribute to cumulative impacts that are unsustainable. 

“Depending on how they set things up in the regulations, that regional assessment outcome [could] be respected in project assessments but currently, there’s no promise or indication that that will be the case. So ‘consider’ is potentially beneficial or wishy-washy.”

Assessing cumulative effects could reduce the number of projects approved

Smith said the big-picture view is often overlooked by the public. “Talking about cumulative effects is always a tricky issue, in part because it’s kind of a boring sounding technical term,” he said in an interview. “It’s not a sexy topic.”

But Smith said while the term lacks pizzazz, cumulative effects describe “the lived experience that people are having with ecosystem collapse, declines in salmon harvests, increasingly severe wildfires, loss of old-growth [and] extinction of iconic species.”

He said addressing cumulative effects could help the province shift away from a history of approving nearly every project that goes through the environmental assessment process.

Cumulative effects describe the lived experiences of people with the loss of old-growth forests and other changes in the ecosystem. Photo: Wildsight

“One of the major issues with environmental assessment is a project-by-project or approval-by-approval approach,” he explained. “Our colonial laws were created at the outset to facilitate extraction, and then environmental protections were kind of added over time as issues came up.” 

“I think a really big challenge of our time is thinking about how we can flip that so that our federal and provincial laws are first asking the question: what do ecosystems need to be healthy and support communities over the long term?”

Smith gives the provincial government credit for including the tool in the updated legislation and is hopeful it will be used correctly.

“Despite the sluggishness with which the regional assessment regulation has proceeded so far, it’s still reasonable to expect that B.C. will follow through on its promise to bring forward regional assessment regulations,” he said. “The first one is going to be really important.”

Regional assessments could include federally regulated rail transportation

Regional assessments have the potential to include impacts on the landscape that have thus far been excluded from the environmental assessment process. 

For example, rail traffic associated with projects — such as the 240 rail cars filled with combustibles that would roll through northwest B.C. daily as part of the proposed Vopak project — is not considered in provincial environmental assessments. That’s because the rail network falls under federal jurisdiction.

“The province should be able to assess the railway transport because it will result in provincial impacts,” Anna Johnston, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, wrote in an email.

Moss agreed. “That CN rail line goes right through the middle of all our communities. If there was a spill or an explosion, it would have a huge impact.” 

The proposed Ridley Island Export Logistics Park in Prince Rupert would lead to increased rail traffic. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority

In its 2019 annual information report, CN said because of the overlap between federal and provincial jurisdictions, the company “does not apply systematically for provincial, municipal or local environmental permits for its railway operations in Canada.” 

In an emailed response to questions about jurisdiction, Transport Canada said it is responsible for monitoring all federally regulated railway companies. “The department conducts approximately 33,000 oversight activities, including inspections and audits, every year.” 

Neither Transport Canada nor CN would provide The Narwhal with information on how many freight cars are travelling through the region and what those cars are carrying. CN maintained that it is able to respond to emergency events “everywhere at any time.” 

According to a 2019 Transportation Safety Board of Canada report, rail accidents have been steadily increasing, including major derailments and accidents involving dangerous goods. Last year, there were 15 per cent more main-track derailments than the previous 10-year average. And in the same year, there were 169 accidents that involved dangerous goods, including eight that resulted in a spill — double the number in the previous year. 

The federal Impact Assessment Agency said it hasn’t done a regional assessment on rail traffic in the region.

Federal regional assessments already underway

Like B.C., the federal government committed to including regional assessments in its environmental assessment process when it updated the Impact Assessment Act in 2019. 

Early this year, in response to three public requests, the federal government started conducting a regional assessment in Ontario’s “Ring of Fire,” a mineral-rich region north of Thunder Bay. The area is a hotbed of mining exploration and home to several First Nations struggling with poverty, food insecurity and lack of access to clean drinking water. The Ring of Fire also includes a vast swath of muskeg that acts as a natural carbon sink. The regional assessment has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Smith said the government’s intent to study the region is hopeful.

In February, the federal government wrapped up a regional assessment of offshore oil exploration activities in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

But Johnston said Ottawa’s review failed to recommend no-go zones for drilling activity, had serious shortcomings in its analysis of greenhouse gas emissions and was conducted on such a short timeline that public and Indigenous consultation was effectively meaningless. The comment period on the draft report closed just one week before the final 210-page report was submitted to the minister of Environment. 

“To offer a comment period with no ability for those comments to influence the report is nothing short of an insult to the individuals, organizations and Indigenous groups that participated in good faith in the process.”

In the report, the committee concludes that the offshore oil and gas drilling “entail minor, localized and temporary disturbances and are unlikely to be significant with the implementation of standard mitigation measures.”

Within days of receiving the report, the Impact Assessment Agency proposed to exempt all future offshore drilling from environmental assessment “to improve the efficiency of the assessment processes of offshore oil and gas exploratory drilling.” In June, the government made the exemption official. 

Smith and Johnston said this serves a warning to British Columbians. “It’s like the opposite of what you actually want to be doing,” Smith said.

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One morning in 1984, a pair of ships bobbed together in the swell 250 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island. The scientists aboard American research vessels Wacoma and Atlantis were about to make history.

Slowly and deliberately, two scientists and a pilot were lowered into the water in a submersible about the size of a shipping container. 

The sub, Alvin, was there to confirm what a 1982 bottom-dredging expedition had accidentally stumbled across: deep down, chimneys were spewing volcanic heat and gases into the ocean. Scientists had discovered the first deepsea vents in the world seven years prior, along the Galápagos Rift, inspiring a flurry of research and public interest into what became one of the greatest biological discoveries of the 20th century. Alvin had been there, too. 

Alvin had recovered hydrogen bombs and would later dive on the wreck of the Titanic, but many of its most valuable contributions have been to science. This day would be one of the latter.

Alvin is prepared for launch off the deck of Atlantis. Photo: Taollan82 via Wikipedia

It took Alvin two hours to descend the 2,200 metres to the sea floor. 

“It’s just a long way down,” says chemical oceanographer Marvin Lilley, who was aboard the Wacoma that day. The discovery was startling: six-storey towers looming over the ridge, two kilometres down, one after another after another.

“In my experience, it’s the most active 15 kilometres anywhere,” Lilley says. 

That activity fuels an alien ecosystem. The gas emanating from the sea floor is rich in sulphides, which can only be converted to food by extremely specialized organisms. Creatures that host these microbes in their gut dart in and out of the superheated water in a dance with death, gathering enough of the life-giving gas to feed their microbes without being cooked alive. A dozen species would eventually be discovered there that exist nowhere else on the planet, even at other vent sites — including the record-holder for the upper temperature limit for life, 121 degrees C.

On a normal patch of sea floor you could find a handful of worms or brittle stars in a square metre. A plot of the same size at what became known as the “Endeavour vent field” could hold up to half a million animals. The sheer volume of creatures is comparable to what would be found in a tropical rainforest. 

This explosion of life exists far below where any light can reach. Hydrothermal vents are the only known ecosystems on the planet that exist completely independent of the sunlight that directly or indirectly feeds every other living thing.

Endeavour hydrothermal vent summit. Photo: CSSF/ Ocean Networks Canada

The alien landscape, with its huge spires crawling with life, was “mind-blowing,” says Kim Juniper, one of the pioneers of hot vent science. “Nothing had ever been seen like that anywhere in the world.” 

Juniper is now chief scientist for Ocean Networks Canada, which has established an extensive network of underwater observatories around the vent fields.

But it wasn’t long after that first discovery that the destruction began. By 1997, when Canada passed the Oceans Act, the Endeavour field was besieged by high-tech plundering in the name of science.

“We were at the point there where people were going down with chainsaws on the front ends of submersibles to slice off large pieces of these chimneys,” Juniper says. “It was a bit like the Wild West.” 

That damage was only a shadow of a much more destructive force that threatens the ocean floor. Still unproven and with shaky financial justifications, deepsea mining has the potential to lay waste to entire vent systems in search of the valuable metals that can concentrate there.

Juniper and his colleagues pleaded the case for setting strict rules for what could and couldn’t be done at Endeavour.

In 2001, the federal government announced it would protect this “Underwater Yellowstone,” as the Globe and Mail described it, and two years later, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents became Canada’s first Marine Protected Area. It protects 97 square kilometres of sea floor and the water column above it. 

Now, there’s a good chance the government will increase that 97 square kilometres by a factor of nearly 1500 times. The 139,700 square kilometre area would make up 2.43 per cent of Canada’s ocean territory, adding significant progress to meeting Canada’s Aichi commitments to protect 10 per cent of the ocean by 2020. 

It would protect the vents as well as an enormous swath of ocean on all sides of it from bottom-contact fishing, deepsea mining, dumping and more growing threats, far from the public eye — and would in the process create an oasis for the weird, the unique and the imperilled creatures of the sea floor. 

Black smoker activity in Endeavour vent field. Photo: Ocean Networks Canada

Octopus at Davidson seamount. Photo: Ocean Exploration Trust / Northeast Pacific Seamount Partners

An ‘oasis’ in the deep

The “Offshore Pacific Area of Interest” is four and a half times the size of Vancouver Island, the nearest point of land, and extends all the way to the outer edge of Canadian jurisdiction. It would be the biggest protected area of any kind in Canada, and nearly triple the total size of all current marine protected areas.

It would protect against just about anything that affects the ocean floor, including mining, bottom-contact fishing, oil and gas exploration and dumping. It would not protect against fishing higher up in the water column.

The proposal has been in the works since 2017, and could be officially designated by late 2020. It will likely be co-governed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and coastal First Nations, though those groups are still negotiating the exact nature of that relationship.

The Offshore Pacific includes the Endeavour vent field, but it also holds many more undersea treasures — in particular, seamounts.

“If you think about a seamount as an offshore volcanic island that just happens to be slightly underwater, you’ve wrapped your head around what a seamount is,” says Cherisse Du Preez, a marine biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

The location of the proposed “Offshore Pacific Area of Interest” marine protected area off the coast of Vancouver Island. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Eighty-seven per cent of Canada’s seamounts fall within the area of interest. 

“Although we have a lot of them, it is incredibly rare in this world to have stewardship over this amount of ecologically and biologically significant ecosystems,” says Du Preez, who studied under Juniper, and now finds herself at the same table as her mentor as the regulations for the protected area are worked out.

Du Preez speaks about the seamounts and vent systems with barely contained excitement. It’s clear that, for her, these are not remote, cold physical features on a map; they’re living miracles that Canada has a chance to protect.

“We’re out there and we’re looking, and we’re making discoveries that have global significance,” she says. The designation of a marine protected area would require that Fisheries and Oceans Canada invest in monitoring and research programs, which would lead to a better understanding of the environment there.

“There are probably many species we’ve never discovered out there,” says Jay Ritchlin, director of the western region for the David Suzuki Foundation. That organization, along with several other conservation groups, has branded the area the “Deepsea Oasis” in recognition of its rarity among the abyssal plain.

Coral and rockfish at SGaan Kinglas Bowie seamount. Photo: Ocean Exploration Trust / Northeast Pacific Seamount Partners

The mysterious plain of the deep sea is covered in thick mud, the result of eons of slow deposition of dead things and silt. It doesn’t encourage much known life. But seamounts’ steep-sided, rocky slopes ascend for thousands of metres from the muddy bottom, providing rare anchor points for bottom-dwelling animals like corals and sea anemones that need something hard to hang onto. Those in turn provide habitat for mobile creatures like crabs and octopus — and, “it’s a huge snowball from there,” Du Preez says.

Sharks and other oceangoing fish are able to find prey there. Jellies, turtles and whales join the party. What would otherwise be a desolate muddy landscape becomes an oasis of life, far offshore. 

The shape of the seamounts is important as well. It works as a ramp, guiding the currents upward. That cold, nutrient-rich water swirls up to meet the sunlight and powers another bloom of life — from microscopic algae all the way up to whales and birds — in a giant whirlpool around the seamount. 

Wherever there aren’t seamounts or deepsea vents, the muddy plain stretches on, featureless and dark. But here and there, with no rhyme nor reason, there’s a crush of activity. A dead whale has dropped to the sea floor, and a bizarre assortment of creatures take advantage of the feast from above. These bonanzas attract crabs, hagfish, ancient sharks and many other scavengers that will slowly break the carcass down to a skeleton. Then they’ll eat the skeleton. 

“You can’t plan for them, and you can’t necessarily draw a marine protected area around them,” says Du Preez. But protecting a big area ensures that some of these hubs of activity will be protected as well. “So we know that we’re catching a lot of them in this area of interest, too.” 

Co-governance or co-opting?

Fisheries and Oceans Canada brought their proposal for the area to the Haida, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Quatsino and Pacheedaht First Nations in 2016. That, explains Nuu-Chah-Nulth fisheries manager Eric Angel, was their first mistake. 

“We would much rather be involved in the conversations at the very start — not when they’re saying, ‘this is what we want to protect,’ ” he says. “We have concerns about what’s happening in the ocean much closer to shore, and those aren’t being addressed.”

The First Nations responded with a proposal to co-govern the area, making decisions as full partners — a notion he says Fisheries and Oceans Canada seems willing to entertain but has so far been unwilling to put in writing. The government “wanted it vague,” he says. 

Statements from ministers and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promising “nation-to-nation relationships” and “reconciliation” don’t amount to much, Angel argues, when the actual process of dealing with the government has proven to be much more rigid. 

Despite the procedural letdowns of the process and the mismatched priorities, Angel says the goals of the marine protected area align with those of the coastal First Nations. Parts of the Offshore Pacific area are part of their respective traditional territories, as places where whaling boats would have hunted far offshore. 

Angel says working on this proposal has provided a catalyst for the First Nations to learn how to work together and has spurred new partnerships. They’re now building their own “oceans dialogue forum” between coastal First Nations to discuss pressing issues that bridge their territories.

The process is also helping to teach a new generation of homegrown researchers. Two young Nuu-Chah-Nulth student scientists, Joshua Watts and Aline Carrier, will be aboard the Tully, a Fisheries and Oceans research vessel, this summer, building relationships with government scientists and conducting their own fieldwork. 

“Each generation you make a little bit of progress and you leave it for the next generation,” Angel says. 

A shield and a buffer

The marine protected area designation would protect both the seamounts and the deepsea vents to some extent. Bottom-contact fishing would be ruled out. Oil and gas exploration, which is not of much interest in the area anyway, would also be prohibited. Scientific research would require permits and specific research plans. Deepsea mining, the aforementioned new technology with the potential to Fern Gully entire vent fields, will be preemptively banned in the area.

“There’s not a ton of industrial activity out there at the moment, which is good,” says Ross Jameson, ocean conservation manager at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. “It’s an opportunity to get all marine users and all interested parties on board.” 

ROV Hercules exploring sponge colony at Explorer seamount. Research in the marine protected area would require permits. Photo: Ocean Exploration Trust / Northeast Pacific Seamount Partners

Just 94 vessels reported fishing for groundfish in the area of interest between 2007 and 2016, according to a slide deck prepared by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. That fishing generated an average of under $150,000 per year in total. The fishing industry argues that’s an underestimate but more current numbers are not publicly available due to privacy concerns.

Tuna, meanwhile, was a much larger fishery in the area. As many as 220 ships fished for tuna in the area of interest over a decade. That fishery, worth up to $2.9 million year on average, and making up about a fifth of Canada’s tuna catch, would be allowed to continue under the new rules since tuna are mostly caught closer to the surface.

Representatives of the bottom-contact fishing industry have expressed opposition to some restrictions in the area.

But there is only so much the government can actually protect against. Some limits are natural, and others jurisdictional. 

For example, Canada is not allowed to tell ships they can’t pass through its marine protected areas. Normal ship traffic — and its associated noise, risk of ship strikes, discharge of bilge water and other pollution — will be allowed just like everywhere else. 

Deck team prepares ROV Odysseus for deployment. Photo: Ocean Networks Canada

The core of the protected area as it stands now will also only cover an area of water well below the surface in most areas. Where the seamounts rise above the bottom, the protection will rise as well. Higher up in the water, an “adaptive management zone” will take over, which has significantly fewer protections.

“We’re really pushing back that they have an obligation to protect the entire water column, from sea floor to surface,” Jameson says. “So that’s one battle that we’re continuing to wage.”

The protected area used to overlap with an operations area used for exercises and testing by the Royal Canadian Navy. That was changed in later versions, but the two areas will still be side-by-side, and noise pollution does not respect lines on a map.

Short-term stressors like ship traffic and fishing are one facet of the risks facing the area. Meanwhile, climate change is mutating offshore ecosystems. 

“We’ve been seeing tropical animals inside Canadian waters for the first time,” Du Preez says. Species like bottlenose dolphins and thresher sharks, which should be found off Mexico or maybe California — have been found following warmer water north in the same process that’s happening all over the planet. 

Big protected areas, like the Offshore Pacific, create havens for wildlife where they aren’t put under additional stress from humans. They can act as nurseries, helping fish populations expand free from fishing impacts. They can also act as buffers against climate change and ocean acidification. But without action on climate change, they can only do so much.

“They’re not the only solution, and they’re not a magic bullet,” says Ritchlin, of the David Suzuki Foundation. “A huge protected area like this is fabulous but it’s not the end of the story.”

Updated at 1:30 p.m. on July 1, 2019: The article originally attributed quotes from chemical oceanographer Dr. Marvin Lilley to chemical oceanographer Dr. John Lupton. 

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After two years of advocacy and 70,000 letters sent, conservation organizations across Canada are celebrating the federal government’s decision to prohibit all oil and gas activities in marine protected areas.

“The public played a really big role in this change,” said Stephanie Hewson, staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, in an interview with The Narwhal.

Marine protected areas — known as MPAs — are effectively national parks of the oceans, establishing strict guidelines about what kind of activities can occur in the ecologically sensitive regions. In 2010, Canada signed onto the Aichi Convention to protect biodiversity and the world’s ecosystems, committing to protect 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas by 2020.

The new rules will apply to all marine protected areas in Canada, including marine conservation and marine national wildlife areas, but the greatest effect will be felt in Marine Protected Areas managed under the Department of Fisheries and Oceans — most especially in the Laurentian Channel.

Proposed regulations published in June 2017 for the Laurentian Channel MPA — located between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland — allowed for extensive oil and gas exploration and production.

An access to information request filed by The Narwhal revealed that a close relationship between the oil industry and federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans may have contributed to that proposal.

But on Tuesday, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Jonathan Wilkinson announced that four industrial activities — oil and gas, mining, waste dumping and bottom trawling — would be banned in all new marine protected areas, starting with the Laurentian Channel.

This fulfilled recommendations made by a national advisory panel that filed its final report in September 2018.

“I’m just greatly relieved that this trial balloon came down with a crash and the oil industry saw that they had pushed too far — and we’re actually going to have real marine protected areas,” Gretchen Fitzgerald, director of the Atlantic Canada chapter of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, told The Narwhal.

“That’s wonderful news.”

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) declined comment for this article.

Canada’s current and proposed Marine Protected Areas. Source: Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Series of offshore near-misses raised alarm

The federal Liberals pledged in their last election platform to increase the amount of Canada’s oceans that are protected to 10 per cent in 2020, up from a mere 1.3 per cent in 2015.

Thursday’s announcement increases the amount of existing protection to 8.2 per cent.

Prior to the federal announcement, it was unclear what protection even meant.

The proposed permitting of activities such as seismic testing for oil and gas, which can have devastating impacts on nearby marine species that rely on sound to communicate, was viewed by many conservationists and wildlife experts as a serious compromise to the government’s vision for ocean protections.

Concerns only increased since 2017 with repeated offshore incidents. A BP Canada drilling unit off the coast of Nova Scotia spilled 136,000 litres of drilling mud in June 2018. Only five months later, an estimated 250,000 litres of oil spilled into the ocean from a Husky drilling platform, making it the largest spill in Newfoundland and Labrador’s history.

Those followed arguably the most dangerous recent near-miss, in 2016 when a heavy pipe from a Shell Canada rig landed within 12 metres of an exploration well — which could have caused a blowout if contacted.

“It’s sheer madness in our opinion that they’re drilling off our shores where they are,” Marilyn Keddy of the Campaign to Protect Offshore Nova Scotia, said.

“But particularly in marine protected areas? My goodness.”

Existing oil and gas licences won’t be cancelled

While the new regulations will prohibit industrial activities in new marine protected areas, including the Laurentian Channel, they won’t result in the immediate cancellation of oil and gas discovery licences in two protected areas where they have already been granted: the Tarium Niryutait MPA in the Mackenzie River Delta and Gully MPA near Nova Scotia.

There is currently no active exploration efforts in the regions, and Wilkinson said the licences will be reviewed again in the future.

The new regulations also don’t prohibit industrial activities in the more common “marine refuge,” which will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis via the impact assessment process. However, marine refuges that do allow such activities won’t be counted towards the 10 per cent commitment.

Nevertheless, representatives of environmental organizations view Thursday’s announcement as a strong and necessary first step.

“There’s a lot of research that’s very well documented that having this type of strongly protected area is essential for restoring ocean health,” Hewson said.

“Sometimes it’s talked about as an insurance policy for the oceans. Oceans are fluid and there aren’t real boundaries besides those drawn on the map but it’s still really important to have those types of protections established in concrete areas.”

Advocates call for stricter rules on offshore activities

Environmental advocates remain concerned about other aspects of ocean protection.

Fitzgerald of Sierra Club Canada said that recent Senate committee hearings concerning the new environmental impact assessment legislation (Bill C-69) demonstrates that it is “very clear that the offshore boards and oil-friendly people in provincial governments are trying to get deregulation in the rest of the ocean.”

An ongoing call for bids near Sable Island, a national park reserve, adds to her fears that the oil industry still holds disproportionate power in the region.

Members of the fishing industry have repeatedly expressed concerns about the potential impacts of a Deepwater Horizon-like oil spill on their livelihoods.

“We will always have to be vigilante,” Fitzgerald said.

Similarly, Keddy of the Campaign to Protect Offshore Nova Scotia said that her organization is actively calling for a full independent inquiry into offshore oil and gas development.

“Our feeling is that decisions have been made by the industry based on their so-called science and we think that there has to be a be a much, much fuller investigation of this,” she said.

“And communities have to have a say. We’re not letting up until they stop.”

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The ocean swells were reaching more than eight metres high when the SeaRose decided to resume pumping oil in the middle of one of Newfoundland’s worst storms in decades.

That decision in November by the SeaRose, a floating production and storage vessel operated by Husky Energy, led to the largest spill in the region’s history. More than 250,000 litres of crude dumped into the ocean when a subsea flow line disconnected in the heavy seas.

For two Canadian researchers, the incident is just the latest evidence that the offshore oil and gas industry needs the oversight of an independent environmental agency to better protect Newfoundland’s Grand Banks region.

York University’s Gail Fraser and the University of Waterloo’s Angela Carter say it’s critical the offshore energy industry have stricter regulation, at a time when Newfoundland is trying to dramatically expand oil production in the ecologically sensitive region.

“Our concern, in light of that spill, is that the system is obviously not working,” said Carter, a Newfoundland-raised political scientist who focuses on the environmental politics of oil and climate change. “How is it possible that this was a procedure that was deemed acceptable? There’s something really wrong here.”

Fraser and Carter are asking the federal and provincial governments to establish a new, independent environmental authority they say would avoid the economic conflicts of the current regulator, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB).

Newfoundland’s Grand Banks is a diverse ecosystem that’s part of a significant marine environment for seabird colonies, marine mammals and a $1.4 billion fishery. It’s a habitat for millions of migratory birds, endangered leatherback turtles, harbour porpoises, seals and multiple species of whales.

Puffins fly in front of an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. An oil spill in 2004 is believed to have killed 10,000 seabirds. Photo: Gail Fraser

10,000 seabirds killed in 2004 spill

But more than 350 kilometres off the eastern coast of Newfoundland, it’s also out of sight for most Canadians. A 165,000-litre oil spill in 2004 in the same area is believed to have killed 10,000 seabirds, but because it happened so far from land in heavy seas that dispersed the damage, few people saw any signs of it.

“It’s out of sight. There’s no graphic images of seabirds being killed to grab the public, and promote outrage that this is going on. It’s a hard one to get the public engaged in,” said Fraser, a biologist whose research focuses on the environmental management of offshore oil and gas industry, and avian wildlife.

That 2004 Terra Nova spill, the worst in Atlantic Canada’s history until the SeaRose incident, resulted in $290,000 in fines for operator Petro Canada. Compare that to the $3 million penalty for Syncrude Canada for the deaths of 1,600 ducks at one of its Alberta tailings ponds in 2008.

The oil sector’s track record for protecting this often-unseen environment, and self-reporting the damage it’s doing, is poor, Carter and Fraser argue. And it’s not just spills that cause challenges. Routine waste discharges, marine noise, light pollution that impacts seabirds and flaring are all common problems, they say.

Husky Energy’s decision to resume pumping oil in a major storm followed a near-miss with an iceberg in May 2017, when the SeaRose delayed disconnecting and opted to gamble in favour of continuing oil production.

“These incidents show that the existing regulatory structure allows oil companies to act primarily in accordance with their economic interests to restart production as soon as possible, or continue with risky production, rather than to protect the environment,” reads a letter Fraser and Carter sent to federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi and his provincial counterpart Siobhan Coady.

Offshore petroleum board has gaps in oversight

Critics say the offshore petroleum board is more concerned with developing the offshore industry and producing revenue for government coffers than protecting the environment. One obvious problem is that the regulator doesn’t have the power to tell operators when to resume production in severe weather. That leaves the oil companies free to take too many risks, Fraser said.

“They made a revenue decision, rather than thinking, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,’ ” she said. “It has identified another gap in overseeing what’s going on.”

Husky Energy, meanwhile, says it has since updated its guidelines for operating in severe weather, put in new protocols to prevent similar spills and is “deeply sorry for the incident and committed to learning from it and putting measures in place to ensure it does not happen again.”

Fraser and Carter want a stronger, more transparent environmental agency that would focus on all stages of offshore activity, from site leasing to decommissioning. That should also include the power to monitor waste treatment, emergency response and evaluate the long-term and cumulative environmental effects of offshore oil and gas extraction, they said.

Newfoundland plans to double oil production by 2030

The calls for more environmental oversight in the Grand Banks come as Newfoundland forges ahead with ambitious expansion plans to add 100 new exploration wells and double production to 650,000 barrels of oil per day by 2030 — all this in a challenging and remote marine environment vulnerable to hurricanes, winter storms, icebergs, fog and rogue waves, obstacles that could delay by weeks the delivery of equipment used to stop major leaks.

But increased scrutiny of the offshore industry isn’t always welcome in an economically challenged province where many see oil as a ticket to prosperity.

“We hope the government will act, but history would tell us they don’t have an appetite for that,” Carter said. “We’ve got a government that is hell-bent on increasing production, and is doing it further out, ever deeper, in more extreme, harsher environments. We’ll have more chances of spills, and no possibility of cleaning them up.”

Both the federal and provincial governments would need to agree to create a new regulatory agency, and neither appears motivated to do so. Environment and Climate Change Canada and Newfoundland’s ministry of natural resources declined to comment for this story.

Natural Resources Canada insists the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB) is doing a good job regulating the offshore industry, and ensuring that development is being done in a responsible way. It also points to the Frontier and Offshore Regulatory Renewal Initiative, a federal-provincial partnership that aims to improve standards for safety and environmental protection.

“The Government of Canada has confidence in the C-NLOPB and its ability to ensure safety and environmental protection,” the ministry said in an e-mail. “The board’s mandate is to oversee responsible development in the offshore, and that is exactly what we expect it will continue to do.”

It adds that Bill C-69, legislation that will amend the environmental impact assessment process for resource projects if passed by the senate, would create a new agency that it says would ensure reviews of proposed offshore projects would follow a consistent, neutral process.

The C-NLOPB, meanwhile, defends its record of protecting the environment for over 30 years as a regulator. It says it works closely with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and other agencies from both governments to make sure its decisions are based on the latest science.

“Offshore safety and environmental protection are paramount in all board decisions. The C-NLOPB will not approve any offshore activity until an operator demonstrates that it has met the legislative and regulatory requirements and has reduced risks to as low as reasonably practicable,” Lesley Rideout, spokesperson for the regulator, said in a statement.

‘I wonder how we’ll look back on this in 20 years’

Some in Newfoundland aren’t so sure, and are beginning to sound the alarm about what’s happening in the Grand Banks. Gerry Rogers, leader of the provincial NDP, as well as the island’s fisheries union, have joined the lobbying efforts for an independent offshore regulator.

After the SeaRose spill, Carter and Fraser hope public opinion may slowly be shifting in favour of better protecting the ocean environment off Newfoundland’s shores. But they’re not holding their breath.

“I wonder how we’ll look back on this in 20 years,” Carter said. “We have a government redoubling efforts to increase oil production offshore, at a time when, globally, other countries are banning exploration and extraction of oil… I feel like Newfoundland is completely out of step with the climate crisis.”

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Despite not yet receiving a final approval for drilling, BP Canada is in the process of moving an offshore drilling rig to the southeast coast of Nova Scotia for a project that local environmental and fishery groups have condemned for its potentially catastrophic impacts if a blowout occurs.

BP plans to drill seven exploration wells in four adjacent leases on the Scotian Shelf, with the deepest drilling occurring at depths of over 3,000 metres — twice the depth of the well that BP was conducting exploratory drilling on when the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe happened.

The federal government gave its formal blessing to the project in February and referred it to the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (CNSOPB) for creating a spill response plan and granting the final approval.

That still hasn’t happened. Yet BP is moving the drilling rig anyways.

A spokesperson for the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board assured in a statement that an “Approval to Drill a Well” (ADW) will only be granted to BP if it demonstrates that drilling will be “conducted in accordance with the legislation and regulations and to the satisfaction of the CNSOPB.”

“BP is aware of all the risks of beginning preparatory work without receiving authorization to begin drilling operations,” the statement read.

But critics aren’t nearly as confident in the board approaching it in an impartial manner.

“The fix is in,” John Davis, director of the fishery lobby group Clean Ocean Action Committee, said in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“You don’t spend $260,000 a day moving a rig of that size and complexity unless you know that you’re going to receive approval. It’s like building a house on land you don’t own: it’s not a good plan unless you know you’re going to get the land. And they know they’re going to get the land.”

Angela Giles of the Council of Canadians agrees.

“BP clearly was anticipating an approval from the CNSOPB, or they wouldn’t have to start moving their rig in the first place.”

Consultation consisted of 45-minute ‘sharing circle’ with up to dozen stakeholders

This past weekend, following criticism of the moving of the drilling rig prior to final approval, the offshore board announced that it was authorizing BP to bring the drilling unit into Nova Scotian waters.

But Davis said that he thinks the announcement was made to provide cover for the board as there’s no legal requirement to grant such a permission to a company.

“There’s no real interim ‘you now have the right to move your rig’ in the regulations that I can find,” he said. “They just thought they’d try to make it official by making some kind of a statement.”

According to critics, the CNSOPB didn’t conduct any public hearings that justify the allowing of the drilling rig to begin setting up. In fact, the main attempt at consultation by the offshore board appeared to be a 90-minute feedback session with between eight and 12 stakeholder groups and only 45 minutes in a “sharing circle” to “discuss and share feedback and concerns.”

In response to being invited to the feedback session, the Offshore Alliance — a consortium of 25 organizations including the Clean Ocean Action Committee, a number of fishermen unions and the Council of Canadians — wrote in a March 2 letter to the offshore board that they weren’t going to attend.

“This meeting seems to be an effort of CNSOPB to tick off another box, pretend that consultation has taken place and then to carry out their appointed task of promoting hydrocarbon development on the Scotian Shelf.”

“We’re not prepared.” https://t.co/oSsfCmyrWI

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 10, 2018

‘We’re not prepared’ for a spill, critics worry

There are a few major concerns about BP’s project, which Environment and Climate Change minister Catherine McKenna described as “not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.”

First up is the storing of a capping stack in Norway, requiring between 12 and 19 days to get it to the drilling rig and putting nearby fisheries at significant risk. Capping stacks serve as a critical piece of equipment used in the case of a uncontrollable blowout.

Then there’s the proposed use of chemical dispersant if a spill occurs, which was heavily deployed in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon disaster and has been found since to have toxic impacts on plankton, coral and humans.

“According to McKenna’s approval, they’re supposed to be talking about spill response, which is one of the major concerns that ourselves and the fishing groups have raised for years now,” Gretchen Fitzgerald with Sierra Club Canada told DeSmog Canada.

“We’re not prepared.”

Critics also suggest that booms would be extremely ineffective in containing oil due to the potential severity of storms and waves. Even regular operations may have major impacts, including noise interfering with the ability for marine mammals to communicate and polluting of nearby waters with drilling fluid and plastics.

As recently reported by the Globe and Mail, marine scientists have major concerns that such activities may put critically endangered North Atlantic right whales at even further risk.

Last summer, 15 right whales died off the Atlantic Coast of Canada and the U.S., a staggering number given only 500 right whales are believed to exist.

Concerns over regulatory capture

Compounding the issue is alleged regulatory capture of the two offshore petroleum boards that help oversee operations in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador — which the federal government is currently working to increase the responsibilities of in its new impact assessment regime.

Many board members of the offshore boards have previous experience with industry. The Nova Scotia board’s chair, Keith MacLeod, previously served as the CEO and chair of Sproule, a petroleum consulting company. Another board member, Barbara Pike, was the founding CEO of the Maritimes Energy Association.

They have contradictory or competing mandates, Giles said, adding the boards have a history of approving requests and leases for oil exploration.

“They’re supposed to be protecting the marine environment while at the same time overseeing and regulating the offshore industry and granting approvals.”

BP may be ready to commence drilling within a week

Timelines for next steps are a bit up in the air, but Fitzgerald said that BP could be ready to drill within a week to 10 days.

On Wednesday, the Council of Canadians will be hosting a preemptive “unwelcoming party” for the drilling rig outside BP headquarters in Halifax. Following that, it’ll be a matter of waiting and watching for critics.

Some had hoped that Fisheries and Oceans Canada would require that BP obtain a Fisheries Act authorization or Species at Risk Act permit before proceeding with the project.

But senior communications advisor for Fisheries and Oceans Canada said the project won’t require permits under those pieces of legislation.

“Fisheries and Oceans Canada is of the view that the project will not result in serious harm to fish or prohibited effects on listed aquatic species at risk. As such, the Department determined that an authorization under the Fisheries Act or a permit under the Species at Risk Act are not required for the project,” the communications advisor told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s very alarming,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s hard to watch the rig approach, because you can see it online. There’s the feeling that this really hasn’t been given the review it should have been given.”

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While much of the country’s attention was focused on the rapidly escalating stand-off between Alberta and British Columbia over the Trans Mountain pipeline this week, another major environmental announcement went largely unnoticed.

On Thursday, the federal government quietly approved BP Canada’s plan to drill up to seven deep exploration wells off the coast of Nova Scotia between 2018 and 2022. In her decision statement, Environment and Climate Change minister Catherine McKenna wrote the project “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.”

That conclusion ran contrary to serious concerns that environmental and fishing organizations have raised about the project — including BP’s role in the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the proximity of the project to critical fish and marine mammal habitats, the company’s dependence on toxic chemical dispersants in the case of an oil spill, and a blowout containment strategy that would require at least two weeks to ship and equip a capping device from Norway.

“We feel like we’re under assault,” said John Davis, director of the Clean Ocean Action Committee, in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “The coastal communities and fishing industry of Eastern Canada is just under assault by this government.”

The Clean Ocean Action Committee is a coalition of fish plant operators and fishermen representing more than 9,000 jobs in southwestern Nova Scotia.

The BP wells off the southeast coast of Nova Scotia are slated to be at least 3.5 times the distance from land and up to twice the depth of the well beneath the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, which exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

ICYMI: BP Wants to Drill Underwater Wells Twice the Depth of Deepwater Horizon in Canada

McKenna’s approval isn’t the last word on the project: the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board still needs to oversee some final processes, including the creation of a spill response plan and issue a licence approval to drill.

But the offshore boards aren’t exactly known for interfering with development.

For all intents and purposes, this decision was the last opportunity for the federal government to make an intervention on a number of different issues: spill response, impacts of routine activities on marine mammals such as right whales, Indigenous rights or greenhouse gas emissions. While some legally binding conditions were included with the approval, none fundamentally addressed the major issues critics have with the project.

The 700 kilometre Scotian Shelf, which effectively divides the Continental Shelf and the deeper Atlantic Ocean, serves as the site of remarkable biodiversity, including whales, seals, sea turtles, fish, corals and birds. That contributes to highly successful fisheries such as the nearby Georges Bank.

“The edge of the Scotian Shelf is a remarkably productive area and important for a lot of animals,” Hal Whitehead, professor of biology at Dalhousie University, told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s that the drilling is actually on and near the shelf that worries me most.”

‘We’re Under Assault’: Feds Quietly Approve Deepwater Oil Drilling Off Nova Scotia https://t.co/4YwqVi9tLQ #offshore #NovaScotia #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/nF6vq0swy7

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 3, 2018

Limited Consultations Resulted in No Major Changes, Critics Said

There wasn’t much of a chance for the public to articulate its concerns at any point during the process, despite McKenna’s assurance there was “meaningful consultation and input from Indigenous groups and the public.”

“We were denied any opportunity for public hearings,” Davis said. “Any comments that we had to make about BP or the Environmental Impact Statement would have to be written briefs. And quite frankly, I work with a lot of really confident and thoughtful people, but most of my fishing community aren’t into writing briefs. But they would be happy to have a discussion. And we were denied that discussion. That really aggravated us.”

In its Environmental Assessment Report, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency reported that it received submissions from five organizations and 26 individuals.

But it’s unclear that the submissions had any discernible impact on the outcome, despite overwhelmingly opposing the project.

“Comments went in, but looking in particular at the spill response plan, I don’t see much change between the draft environmental impact statement and the environmental assessment report that just came out with McKenna’s approval,” said Gretchen Fitzgerald, director of Sierra Club Canada’s Atlantic region chapter.

The announcement occurs during a time of flux for the offshore boards and environmental assessment process in Canada

Next week, it’s expected that the government’s long-awaited overhauls of the country’s various environmental laws will be announced — with the new Impact Assessment Act and Canadian Energy Regulator Act having the potential to further entrench the regulatory responsibilities of the two petroleum offshore boards.

“We’re really going to be watching to see what the legislation is going to look like in regards to offshore oil and gas,” Fitzgerald said.

ICYMI: Canada’s Offshore Petroleum Boards Under Fire for Conflict of Interest

In addition, the federal government has been amalgamating regulations on offshore oil and gas activities under the primary consultation of industry players, moving from a prescriptive to a performance-based approach that gives companies far more flexibility in how it manages risk and prepares for situations like blowouts — such as not requiring a capping device nearby.

“When you’re drilling that deep, you better know exactly what you’re doing,” Fitzgerald said. “With the poor regulations and industry oversight that we perceive out there, we’re not reassured that’s happening. They’re very far from emergency and spill response.”

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Rumoured changes to the way the federal government makes decisions about offshore oil and gas projects have fishermen and environmentalists crying foul on Canada’s East Coast.

The changes would give offshore petroleum boards in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador a major hand in future environmental assessments, a move that Gretchen Fitzgerald of Sierra Club Canada calls a “betrayal.”

“This is more than what the oil companies would have got under Stephen Harper,” Fitzgerald, director of Sierra Club Canada’s Atlantic region chapter, told DeSmog Canada.

Offshore oil and gas boards were originally designed to promote oil and gas development. But now they may be assigned a major role in assessing the environmental risk that development poses. These conflicting roles — part regulator, part promoter — is a major source of concern.

For Ottawa, the stakes are high. In 2015 the Liberals were elected in part on the promise to “make environmental assessments credible again.”

DeSmog Canada took a deep dive into the murky waters of offshore petroleum boards to help understand the concerns about the proposed changes.

What are offshore petroleum boards?

There are two such entities in Canada — the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB) and Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NSOPB). Both were created shortly after the Atlantic Accord of 1985, which established joint management and resource sharing of offshore oil and gas resources.

“The boards were created and primarily designed to ensure economic benefits from oil and gas development,” said Angela Carter, assistant professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and expert in Newfoundland’s offshore regulatory structures.

“Environmental responsibilities are a secondary concern. So there’s something very wrong about the Boards taking on lead environmental assessment responsibility.  — that is not their primary function.”

The chair and CEO of Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore board previously worked at Chevron, while his counterpart on the Nova Scotia board was the former CEO of Sproule, a Calgary-based petroleum consulting firm. Other board members have industry experience with companies including ExxonMobil, Nexen, Encana, the Maritimes Energy Association, Lasmo and offshore fields including Hibernia, Terra Nova, White Rose and the Sable Offshore Energy Project.

There are no marine biologists on either of the boards, Carter pointed out.

Newfoundland and Nova Scotia both have significant economic stakes in the development of offshore resources, with plenty of potential revenue from royalties and taxes on the line.

ICYMI: BP Wants to Drill Underwater Wells Twice the Depth of Deepwater Horizon in Canada

Both provinces are facing fiscal woes, so their governments — which jointly appoint board members with Ottawa — aren’t exactly advocating for environmental laws that would restrain future development prospects. For example, Newfoundland recently excluded emissions created by offshore oil and gas projects from its greenhouse gas legislation.

“The supposed prosperity that this industry was supposed to bring hasn’t panned out in either province,” Fitzgerald said. “But they’re desperate for the royalties.”

What are the potential changes being proposed?

In mid-2017, the federal government released a discussion paper about its broader overhaul of the environmental assessment processes in Canada.

While the discussion paper only made a handful of references to offshore oil and gas projects, it set off serious alarms for fishery and environmental groups.

That’s because it proposed that future environmental assessments of offshore oil and gas projects would be “jointly conducted” between a new federal “impact assessment” agency and the relevant offshore petroleum board. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency currently heads up assessments for major offshore projects, so this would be a significant shift.

Fitzgerald said it would effectively be a de facto abdication to the offshore boards, pointing to an ongoing court case over an oil drilling lease in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which the federal government passed up the opportunity to intervene on despite having the ability to. As she put it, the federal government is often very reluctant to step in.

ICYMI: How Oil Lobbyists Pressured Canada to Allow Drilling in a Marine Park

While the potential change doesn’t go as far as some would like — with industry and politicians calling for the delegation of offshore boards as “responsible authorities” like the National Energy Board and Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which have the power to conduct environmental assessments — recent precedent suggests boosters may get close to the same thing.

“In a way, they are delegating to the provinces what is supposed to be a federal responsibility over our endangered species and over our oceans to a board that’s in a conflict of interest position from the get-go,” Fitzgerald said.

Okay, what would be a better way of doing things then?

Well, listening to the expert review panel on environmental assessments appears to be a good start.

The four-person panel advocated strongly for a single agency to perform all environmental assessments: “An authority that does not have concurrent regulatory functions can better be held to account by all interests than can entities that are focused on one industry or area and that operate under their own distinct practices,” the panel wrote.

According to critics, taking this approach would help avoid the conflicting mandates of both promoting and regulating resource development. As the East Coast Environmental Law Association put it in a recent policy paper, this would promote “impartiality, accountability and public trust.”

Carter said Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore board has a long-standing problem of lack of transparency and accountability, something which must be rectified with any new assessment arrangement.

“A cornerstone of environmental assessments has to be a free flow of information with the public and ample input from independent experts,” she said. “Transparency is fundamental to environmental assessment, but communicating with the C-NLOPB Board has been compared to meeting a wall of silence.”

Industry often criticizes the duplication of environmental assessments between federal and provincial governments. In a recent presentation by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the lobby group argued that the 2012 reforms resulted in a “fragmented, repetitive licence by licence approach” for offshore activities.

Creating a single, neutral agency responsible for all assessments could feasibly resolve that issue.

What’s next?

We could see draft legislation in the next few weeks.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency recently told Canadian Press it will “ensure that the views of Canadian, as well as facts and evidence, will guide project decisions moving forward.”

However, “evidence-based decision-making” can be difficult to pull off when dealing with a lack of baseline data to assess environmental impacts, which Carter said is the case in the offshore.

ICYMI: Is Canada Fudging the Numbers on its Marine Protection Progress?

“Right now, given the climate crisis, we need to be winding down fossil fuel extraction,” Carter concluded. “We need regulatory regimes that are focused on managing the decline of fossil fuel production, not ones that are focused on streamlining regulatory processes so we can get more oil out faster.

“That’s the opposite direction we ought to go if we’re interested in climate stability.”

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