Preston Manning is the founder of the Manning Centre and the former leader of the Reform Party of Canada.
Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle! So the old joke goes. At one time, Canadians were known for having a sense of balance, for seeking and finding the midpoint between extremes. But this no longer appears to be the case. Finding a balance between environmental protection and economic development increasingly eludes us, particularly with respect to building pipelines to move energy resources to seaports and in developing those energy resources.
So what can and should be done to restore balance on the environmental-economic front?
At one time, economic development took precedence – to the serious detriment of the environment. And so, at both the provincial and federal levels, environmental-impact assessment acts were passed requiring any proponent of a major economic initiative to file such assessments with the appropriate regulatory authorities.
At first, these assessments grossly underestimated the environmental effects of industrial projects. But under the pressure of regulatory scrutiny and third-party examination, they gradually increased in scope and reliability – and usefulness.
In physics, according to Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But in our polarized political world, for every action there is often an opposite and unequal reaction, resulting in imbalance. Thus, in an increasing number of cases, environmental protection now takes precedence over economic development. In British Columbia, for example, this imbalance has gone so far that a resource developer harming a fish or animal is deemed an unpardonable sin, but an environmental lobby killing the job and income of a resource sector worker is deemed a cause for celebration.
This imbalance is evident in the National Energy Board’s 533-page report, released in 2016, recommending conditional approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline-expansion project. Only two summary pages and one short chapter are devoted to the project’s economic feasibility and benefits to Canada, whereas more than a third of the report is devoted to the recognition and assessment of negative environmental and social effects. Nowhere in the report is there an assessment of the costs and economic effects of project deferral or implementation of the hundreds of constraints demanded by interveners or the 150-plus conditions recommended by the board.
The NEB report was found to be deficient by the Federal Court of Appeal, but not on these grounds. Instead, in its 265-page decision, the court furthered the imbalance between economic and non-economic factors by requiring yet another round of consultations with Indigenous groups and additional assessments of marine traffic. Again, the court’s analysis and decision-making process is focused almost entirely on the environmental and social effects of the project, with no consideration of effects on the economy, negative effects on energy users, investors and workers if the project fails to proceed or the costs of delays and mitigation measures.
To be fair, neither the NEB nor the court can really be blamed for this imbalance. As the Court of Appeal itself points out, it and the board are bound by the “legislative regime” established by such statutes as the National Energy Board Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
How might a better balance between environmental protection and economic development be achieved? By maintaining the legislated requirements for environmental impact assessments, but amending regulatory and environmental protection legislation to require (1) that the proponents of major environmental-protection measures file economic-impact assessments of the measures they propose and (2) that regulators give equal and balanced consideration to the economic and environmental effects of the projects they evaluate. At the federal level, legislate these provisions via a Canadian economic-impact assessment act – the economic equivalent of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
If it is feared that meeting these requirements will further lengthen the regulatory-hearing process, let governments also impose reasonable time limits on such hearings. And should a hearing exceed those limits, empower the regulators to allocate the costs of the extension to those deemed most responsible for causing it. As it is, the time required to arrive at binding decisions on energy projects has become so long and uncertain as to discredit the whole process and make it a subject of ridicule. (It has been suggested, for example, that if Canada were to ever run out of oil and gas, we could just burn the transcripts from energy-related regulatory and court hearings and thereby extend our energy supplies by another 10 years.)
The ultimate result of these proposed legislative initiatives would be to enable regulatory authorities, governments and the courts to receive both the environmental assessments and the economic assessments they need to strike timely and appropriate balances between the two.