Editorial: Stealth Bill C-38 upends CEAA

Over the years, mine developers in Canada have heard politicians at the provincial and federal level make so many empty promises to streamline the redundancy-laden process for mine approvals, it’s been easy to tune them out and temper hopes.

But that scenario is changing fast, and in a big way, with the governing federal Conservative party having introduced Bill C-38 in late April. Modestly titled “An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures,” Bill C-38 is not a tweak, but a sweeping omnibus bill that amends 60 acts, adds three, repeals six and completely rewrites the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

All manner of unrelated major policy matters from immigration reform (the backlog for skilled immigrants essentially eliminated) to telecommunications ownership (foreign ownership loosened) have been tossed into Bill C-38, and Members of Parliament will have to vote up or down on the whole kit and caboodle. With the Conservatives holding a solid majority and its members well whipped, the bill is guaranteed to pass as cranky opposition members stand by powerless.

With respect to the CEAA, the federal government is primarily responding to the famous hurdles that have recently hampered development of the tax-revenue-rich oilsands industry, and the related transport of oil by pipeline from Alberta to customers in the U.S. and Asia. Canada’s miners — always the poor cousins to Big Oil — get to go along for the ride and benefit from oil-friendly changes to the CEAA.

In the big picture, the federal government is passing off much more responsibility to the provinces to carry out environmental assessments, except for ones of vaguely defined national interest, or ones that impinge on First Nations treaty rights. At the same time, though, it’s giving more federal power in environmental matters to the cabinet by allowing it to overrule decisions of high-level federal bureaucratic entities, such as the National Energy Board.

Critics of the CEAA revisions argue that debt-ridden provinces have already been cutting back funding to their environmental agencies, which hampers their ability to properly carry out environmental assessments. At the same time, the federal government is looking to slash funding to its own environmental agencies, though it argues some of the money saved from not doing redundant environmental assessments will be redirected to stepping up enforcement of environmental regulations, which sounds reasonable.

One consequence of Bill C-38 is that it guts MP committee hearings in environmental matters — with the committee process arguably being one of the last useful things MPs do, as power has steadily concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Office over the last few decades.

Such sweeping changes brought about to the CEAA with little parliamentary or public debate will create enormous blowback across the country as anti-mining and anti-capitalist political and environmental groups digest just how much ground they have lost. 

With leftist street agitators such as the Occupy Wall Street crowd, the student protesters in Quebec and the anti-oilsands-pipeline, non-governmental organizations already worked up into a frenzy over the past year, these changes to the CEAA should give extra oomph to anti-resource development protests this summer, particularly in B.C., in relation to the proposed oilsands pipelines there and mine proposals such as Taseko Mines’ New Prosperity.

New Prosperity is the kind of project federal officials don’t like to talk about as it applies to the revised CEAA — the pro-business provincial government once gave its environmental approval to a controversial proposed mine on the site, only to have the federal government deny its own environmental approval, sending the project into the limbo it’s in today. 

Environmental groups in Canada have also been on the defensive of late over new moves by the Canada Revenue Agency to better scrutinize the political activity of not-for-profit, tax-exempt environmental NGOs. There have already been some high-profile reorganizations  such as enviro-deity David Suzuki resigning as a director of his charitable-status David Suzuki Foundation, so that he can continue to openly criticize governmental policies in Canada.