5 days Ago By Jamie Sarkonak
Article content It’s hard to get major projects built in a country that requires evaluations of systemic racism, local psychosocial conditions and confidential Indigenous spiritual knowledge to be considered at length before any approval is issued. But that’s the current scheme for building big projects that fall under federal jurisdiction and are thus subject to the Impact Assessment Act — and that’s exactly why any plan for turning around the country’s lost decade requires its repeal. The Impact Assessment Act (IAA), passed by the Liberals with great pride in 2019, requires extensive sociological surveys — taking into account demographics, women, Indigenous and otherwise non-white racial identity — to be conducted alongside environmental assessments prior to any federal project receiving approval.
Impact assessments, according to the law , must take into account “social or economic conditions,” positive or negative, that are likely to arise from the project; confidential Indigenous knowledge , as well as Indigenous cultural concerns; “community knowledge”; and the “intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors.” The result: delays, more work for consultants and, ultimately, fewer shovels in the ground. From 2019, when the law came into force, to 2023, only one of 25 total projects designated by the act for federal assessments received approval (and this was, in the later stages, delegated to the B.
C. government’s process). At the same time, investment has dwindled: Natural Resource Canada’s project inventory was worth $711 billion in 2015, but in 2023, that dropped to $572 billion.
Had investment kept pace with population increases, it would have reached $985 billion by now, according to a Macdonald-Laurier Institute analysis released Monday. Take the Indigenous-owned Cedar LNG terminal , which will ship Canadian energy out of Kitimat, B.C.
Approved in 2023 by then-environment minister Steven Guilbeault, it had to undergo a full socioeconomic review before a green light could be given. In its decision letter, the agency cautioned that the project’s positive impacts might be “experienced disproportionately by males and non-Indigenous people,” and warned that family cohesion and the health of Indigenous women could suffer with “an influx of a majority male workforce.” It went on to complain that the wages paid out from the project, though beneficial, “may not automatically benefit Indigenous women, subgroups, recent immigrants and racialized communities.
” Ultimately, the project was required , as a condition of approval, to create a gender and diversity plan based on Statistics Canada labour data, echoing the Employment Equity Act and its requirement for government to hire on the basis of identity. And on it goes. The IAA’s gender component has made it commonplace for companies to consider, in the application process, the potential for human trafficking and domestic violence, the idea being that with a largely male workforce comes a bigger market for prostitution and a greater potential for abuse.
This was the case with Cedar LNG , as well as the proposed Upper Beaver gold mine near Ontario’s Kirkland Lake. Even when human trafficking isn’t an explicit consideration, gender remains a tricky obstacle. For the proposed Eskay Creek gold and silver mine in northern British Columbia, the company in charge had to consider making a “broader commitment to improving equality and not perpetuating norms and structures that have contributed to inequality,” and include details about company diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training.
Similar issues were highlighted in the application for a gold and copper mine in northern Quebec , whose proponents were urged to develop “measures to ensure ...
diversity in senior positions.” The IAA’s vast socioeconomic requirements range far beyond sex, however. In the course of assessing the Wasamac gold mine planned halfway between Timmins, Ont.
, and Val-d’Or, Que., which had been in the assessment process in 2020, the company was asked in 2021 to conduct a human health assessment of the community and its “diverse subgroups,” taking into account “their different access to resources, opportunities and services within the community.” That was on top of the many other environmental assessments it was required to produce.
In addition, the company was to prepare a social assessment, which was to cover community cohesion, perceptions of racism, the “psychosocial environment,” local food security and a wide range of information about Indigenous traditions in the area. Ultimately, the requested information wasn’t provided to the government in time, and thus the project was terminated at the end of 2024. Along with gold mines, the intensive requirements of the IAA have also killed pipelines, hence the “no more pipelines law” moniker it’s received from Conservatives.
In 2023, the proposed 780-kilometre Gazoduq pipeline was proposed to connect TC Energy’s northeastern Ontario pipeline to a proposed liquefaction and export terminal on Quebec’s Saguenay River. Guilbeault killed the terminal project in 2022, following Quebec’s refusal to approve it in 2021. The pipeline project, meanwhile, died in 2023: the company proposing to build it had been given a 183-page checklist of environmental, social and economic assessments to perform, and didn’t provide them in time.
The checklist’s demands included: human health assessments covering the physical, mental, sexual and spiritual health of local communities and each Indigenous group in the area, broken down by demographic group; social assessments covering crime rates and community social networks; detailed descriptions and maps of the communities involved, including fire stations, schools, daycares, housing, recreation areas, etc.; economic assessments covering local job statistics, wages, training programs, Indigenous-specific training programs and local businesses; and Indigenous assessments covering the above factors, as well as Indigenous laws, land use, rights issues, traditional social structures and even language. In assembling these reports, the company had to show how it used “Indigenous knowledge” in its work, as well as the viewpoints of “diverse subgroups.
” Combined with the extensive environmental reporting that was also required, the company was pretty much being asked to write an encyclopedia series on the areas its pipeline would cross. From there, the would-be Gazoduq pipeline builders were asked to describe, in detail, the potential effects, positive or negative, of their project on the many dimensions of society they were ordered to study. These analyses had to be intersectional, looking into the different impacts that could be felt by men and women, young and old.
The company was required to “identify whether social divisions might be intensified as a result of the project,” “evaluate potential social effects associated with the increase in disposable income,” “describe any anticipated effects on language” and even “identify and consider the barriers that impede taking advantage of the positive effects on social conditions and how they are accentuated across diverse subgroups.” Further, they were required to predict future changes to local job markets and wages, and even had to provide their plans to use gender-neutral signage and other DEI efforts. Finally, all planned mitigation measures to the above had to be plotted out , again with special consideration for identity.
Considering how much territory that pipeline had to cross, how much detailed multi-year social analysis it was expected to produce for the government and how little interest it was being shown by the government authorities who already killed plans for an accompanying export terminal, it’s no wonder it was abandoned. The feds have defended the legislation as necessary and socially responsible, but what they really seem to be doing is downloading government functions — and an increasingly aggressive government social agenda — onto private players. Health care, education and crime are all responsibilities of government.
As for private corporations, it’s essential that groundwater, forest health and even archaeological surveys are conducted prior to construction. But psychosocial health and staff diversity? That should be up to the company to decide. Comically, even foreign aid projects — including those that are not run by government, but are federally funded — fall under the scope of the IAA.
Global Affairs Canada is currently deciding whether a program for vulnerable people in Afghanistan should warrant a full assessment. The Business Development Bank of Canada is awaiting the same determination for a warehouse in Texas. The Canadian Armed Forces even had to launch a preliminary environmental review to install two diesel storage tanks at a peacekeeper base in Ukraine (this project was terminated before it could begin).
Nearly 100 projects have gone through this process. And if you think that’s ridiculous, federal lands fall under the law, too, even when it comes to simple infrastructure upgrades. Preliminary environmental assessments had to be conducted to replace fire-destroyed washrooms in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, to install a single “No Anchor” sign in a no-anchor zone of the Fraser River and to replace the old roofs at B.
C.’s Cape Beale light station out of concern for the local bats (though no bats have been known to live there). Many more very minor touch-up projects can be found in the federal catalogue.
There are very few things — provincial matters, really — that the Impact Assessment Act doesn’t touch. And even there, it’s been a fight to get the feds to keep their red-tape trigger-happy hands away: Alberta had to take the matter all the way up to the Supreme Court to put constitutionally respectful boundaries on the IAA, and even that only half worked, because the feds don’t want to comply with the court direction (Alberta is therefore headed back to court ). It wasn’t always this way.
The IAA’s predecessor, the Harper-era Canadian Environmental Assessment Act of 2012, didn’t require as many identity and cultural considerations. That’s why, for example, the 2022 approval of a new palladium mine near Marathon, Ont., which fell under the old law because it was initiated prior to the IAA taking effect, didn’t come with as many onerous socioeconomic requirements for the project to follow.
During the mine’s assessment, housing and infrastructure concerns had been raised by a local First Nation whose on-reserve housing was at capacity. The company proposing the project promised a housing complex in the nearby town to accommodate them. This, said the local First Nation, was systemic racism because its people, who are in need of homes, wouldn’t want to move to the company-built complex in town.
Also discussed was the local First Nation’s philosophy on education, capacity for schooling and history of residential schools, even though education was outside the mining company’s responsibility. Nevertheless, it was concluded by government staffers that the First Nation was a victim of systemic racism because the local town’s schools — a responsibility of the province — received more funding than the on-reserve schools — a responsibility of the feds. Ultimately, the mine was approved by Guilbeault with conditions to mitigate impacts on traditional food sources.
Diversity plans, extraneous housing and education projects were left out, even though concerns in those areas were raised. That was the right call: it’s up to the feds and First Nations to take care of reserve amenities, not the private sector and the province. Under today’s law, these requirements would have likely been much more expansive.
Overall, the Impact Assessment Act is a handout to private consulting firms that benefit from a dragged out, regulatorily burdensome procedure that prevents actual work from getting done. Unfortunately for anyone who wants anything built in this country, it’s been used as a policy speculum, widening, from a few short lines of law, its purpose from sober second thought to socioeconomic panacea. If we want to leave the lost decade behind, we have to leave the Impact Assessment Act with it.
National Post.
