Proposed Canada-N.L. impact assessment agreement ‘something we should be worried about’, says MUNL prof.

Big changes are coming to Newfoundland and Labrador’s environmental assessment process for resource development projects, but one expert says a draft agreement between the provincial and federal governments could diminish community involvement and reduce environmental protection.

Federal impact assessment laws in Canada are stronger than the province’s. Combining the two into a single process as per the proposed agreement is “something that we should be worried about,” says Camille Ouellett Dallaire, an assistant professor of environmental science at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook.

Newfoundland and Labrador will soon join several other provinces when it signs the Co-operation Agreement between Newfoundland and Labrador and Canada, part of the Mark Carney government’s “one project, one process” effort to streamline resource development project approvals by merging federal and provincial environmental assessment processes.

On April 1, the federal government published the draft agreement online for public review and feedback. Submissions are being accepted until April 28. “The proposed co-operation agreement reflects our shared commitment with the Federal Government to work together on environmental assessments,” provincial Environment Minister Chris Tibbs said in a news release at the time. “We want to hear from Indigenous governments and organizations, industry, and the public as we move forward with this agreement.”

Since then, the provincial government has done little to promote the review or encourage public participation.

Risk of diminished public involvement and environmental protection

The co-operation agreements are intended to reduce the workload of federal and/or provincial governments, which often lead separate environmental or impact assessment processes before a project can be approved or denied.

The agreements will allow federal and provincial processes to be merged, or federal impact assessments to be replaced by provincial assessments. In the federal government’s own words, it will work with provinces “to meet shared and respective responsibilities to protect the environment and Indigenous rights through a single process from the perspective of proponents, the public, and Indigenous groups.”

In doing so, Ouellett Dallaire says, the draft agreement language creates several alarming ambiguities, including how impact assessments under the agreement would address questions around public involvement. “The federal process has a lot of public participation, there’s funding for participation, there’s funding for communities to hire experts to comment on some of that, and that does not exist in Newfoundland,” she explains. “So there’s a huge gap or variability in what public participation means there.”

The draft agreement also neglects to clarify how Indigenous Peoples and local communities will be protected from the potential adverse effects of projects.

“There’s very little said here about respecting local communities,” she says, noting the agreement’s language around respecting Indigenous rights isn’t the same as “ensuring Indigenous people are thriving.” She also notes the absence of specific language ensuring non-Indigenous communities will be protected. “There’s nothing in this clause that talks about how are we going to assure that people that live near this project will receive the benefits of this project.”

While the draft agreement raises more questions than answers, Ouellett Dallaire’s main concern is that “there’s a risk that Newfoundland and Labrador becomes the benchmark” for environmental and impact assessments in the province, “when what we really would want is [for] the federal assessment” to be the benchmark.

Deregulation for investment a ‘capitalist trope’

From a broader perspective, she says, the move to reduce regulatory burden for industry prioritizes corporate interests and profits over people, communities and the environment. Ouellett Dallaire points to a clause of the agreement which says the federal and provincial governments are committed to “increasing regulatory certainty in order to attract capital and promote our economic resilience.”

She calls the idea of environmental deregulation for the purposes of attracting investment a “capitalist trope”. 

“This idea [that] we need to make the process of environmental regulation faster and have more certainty — that’s embedded in a capitalist perspective of extraction,” she says. “It’s not embedded in the growth of a just and green society.”

 “Some of this rhetoric and some of these ideologies, they really put us in a difficult situation as a society because […] it’s easy to buy into this narrative [that] we need to [facilitate] investment now because otherwise we’re gonna miss the boat, or the time is now because of [some] crisis,” Ouellett Dallaire continues.

“There’s other ways of improving quality of life; like, there’s billionaires everywhere — we can tax the rich to try to support our social systems better. Investments in large projects isn’t the only way to achieve a better quality of life, but that’s the ideology embedded in these agreements.”