What is wrong with the current system?
The Canadian government is currently undergoing a huge capital investment initiatives which have made the natural resource sector grow. Therefore, the environmental assessments within its federal jurisdiction have proved to be critical to the viability of its various projects. The Canadian federal government should promote a self-reporting, self-regulatory model of assessment which would ensure that the environment and the public interest is never compromised for the sake of any gain which could be detrimental to the humans welfare. Therefore, there is need to formulate and propose new legislation as suggested by the Liberal Party of Canada that would create, at least for the first time, a comprehensive and statutorily defined federal environmental assessment process (Deakin & Reid, 2014).
The problem with the current system of environmental impact assessment of Canada relates back in 2010 when the budget of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) was cut down by 40% to $17 million (Fitzpatrick & Sinclair, 2009). The cut on CEAA was followed by a set of radical changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, thereby reducing the scope of the public engagement and divvied up responsibility throughout the provincial and federal agencies. The Navigation Protection Act replaced the Navigable Waters Protection Act thus removing federal protection for about 98% of all the lakes and rivers in Canada. Moreover, the Fisheries Act, which is the Canada’s strongest and oldest piece of environmental legislation, had to be rewritten to eliminate the explicit habitat protection for fish. Consequently, the result of all these changes has promoted self-reporting, self-regulating system which has numerous grey areas in which discretionary judgment calls are made with no accountability (Schmidt, Joal & Albrecht, 2015). As a result, these changes has not impressed at all. The Canadian environmental groups have pointed to deregulation as the evidence of the unbalanced system which favors proponents at the expense of the environment and the public interest. Thus, pointing out the necessity of the promoting the proposal of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Additionally, the developers and business fraternity of the Canadian government need to clearly understand the environmental impacts of their undertakings to fauna and flora at large. The aboriginal and community knowledge is considered an essential aspect of a fair and successful environmental assessment process (2002). Though, the CEAA 2012 simply mentions that the Traditional Ecological Knowledge “may” be considered (Hacking & Guthrie, 2011). The concern of the Assembly of the First Nations over the involvement in the environmental assessments within the framework of CEAA 2012 is to ensure that the loophole in the current system of environmental assessment is bridged to take incorporate the rights of the various relevant stakeholders in its legislation. The current system makes it uneasy to ascertain how big the role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge would play in the environmental assessment under the CEAA 2012.
Further, the screening process within the CEAA 2012 has been changed. Screening constituted over 99% of the environmental assessment undertaken under CEAA 1995. These screenings incorporated a small-scale self-assessment, while in CEAA 2012, the screenings have been eliminated like any other form of assessment, are simply considered as the registration of the project. This problem posed under this category is that a huge majority of the projects which were assessed as screening have now been excluded from the legislation (Sheate, 2010).
The current system of CEAA 2012 has reduced the scope of federal environmental assessments. It outlines that the environmental assessments will only be undertaken for projects of environmental concern for the Canadian government (Hacking & Guthrie, 2011). The CEAA 2012 focus has narrowed to give emphasis on the effects of the environmental components which are under the federal jurisdiction. In the previous system, all the effects on the biophysical environment and the resulting socioeconomic effects were assessed. On the other hand, the CEAA 2012 has narrowed the definition of the environmental effects to cover only impacts on a few specific groups.
Sustainability Assessment
The wide range of practices within the sustainability assessment has consequently resulted in different definitions. Bond et al. (2012) propose a most inclusive definition by adopting a wide perspective and then defining it as “any form of process which directs decision-making towards sustainability.” Therefore, in a nutshell sustainability assessment can be considered as any process which is aimed at first, fostering sustainability objectives by influencing change through contributing to a better understanding of the contextual interpretation and the meaning of sustainability, and secondly, ensure an integration of the sustainable issues into decision-making by assessing and identifying the past and the future sustainability impacts.
Sustainability assessment has been associated with the wide scope of impact assessment –the process of identifying the possible consequences of a proposed or current action in the future. There exist two perspectives, respectively considering the sustainability assessment or the impact assessment as the overarching field. First, impact assessment is considered as the generic field which encompasses various process, approaches, among which are widely used and well-known (for instance, strategic environmental assessment, environmental impact assessment, risk assessment and health impact assessment), while others are recent developments or less clearly defined. Secondly, Ness et al. (2013) and Hacking et al. (2011) argue that sustainability assessment is an umbrella term which includes product-related assessment (that is, life cycle analysis), indicator development, and integrated assessments, for example, environmental impact assessment.
It is worth noting that the analogy with the view of International Association Impact Assessment (IAIA) on impact assessment is that sustainability assessment is usually regarded as an “ex-ante” process which aims at predicting the future outcomes or assess in advance the effects of decisions and provide support to the choice between the different options. Assessing the effects is prompted by an intervention (past outcomes) which is mostly used at the end of a management cycle or policy is referred to as an “evaluation.”
A Proposal for Sustainability Assessment in Canada
The Canadian government should give the environmental assessment process a very different approach in order to ensure that the proposals of the Liberal Party of Canada are incorporated. The inclusivity of the various critical aspects of the environmental assessment process is the basis on which the party’s founding tenets on environmental conversation is restored to ensure a robust oversight with a comprehensive environmental assessments within the various territories, provinces and under the federal jurisdiction to achieve optimality (Munier, 2014). Secondly, an elaborative sustainability assessment process to foster the new environmental conservation measures should be pegged on the decisions based on facts, evidence, science, and inculcates public interest. Additionally, the process should ensure that the Canadians express their opportunities and views purposefully for meaningful participation. Lastly, the entire environmental assessment framework proposed should identify the best technologies to reduce environmental impacts. The proposal should entail four critical aspects of sustainability assessment which include; adopting a holistic perspective, fostering sustainability objectives, incorporating the aspects of sustainability within the assessment process, and supporting decisions.
First, the proposal should be inclusive of the fact that all the sustainability assessment should be steered by the defining principles and scope of sustainable development. That is, sustainability principles should apart from pervading the sustainability assessment’s content by adopting an integrative or a holistic perspective and achieve fostering of the sustainability objective, it should also process how to deal with response to change, transparency, normativity, precautionary stance and participation. Secondly, sustainability assessment should be undertaken within a framework to support decision-making. This would encompass assessing the sustainability alternatives and impacts for decision-making –which entails the rules for trade-offs and synergies. The identification of the synergies and trade-off can be undertaken through; a comparative value analysis –which ensures that the environmental impacts are scored within the pre-set values, cost-benefit analysis in which negative and positive impacts are compared after being assigned some monetary values, and a multi-criteria analysis –both qualitative and quantitative impacts are ranked on pre-set criteria. Such an objective is usually realized by a way of fostering multi-criteria decision analysis (Munier, 2014). Moreover, the sustainability assessment process should be carried on the basis of a conceptual sustainability framework and its indicators, effective communications (clear and objective language, visualization graphics and tools, make appropriate data available), integrated into and adapted to the institutional context. Furthermore, it should be guided by an iterative assessment process, maintain and develop adequate capacity, and ensure a continuous process of learning and improvement.
Advancing the Bellagio Principles
The government should advance the Bellagio Principles –“the Guidelines for Practical Assessment of Progress Towards Sustainable Development.” This advancement should ensure that these principles which serve as the general guidelines for the process of sustainability assessment are updated and structured to suit the changing environmental concerns over time. Due to the changing sustainability assessment context, the principles should be reviewed time to time, put in a more succinct manner, structured to eliminate the duplications or ambiguous phrases, and finally, new insights incorporated into the new framework (Dalal-Clayton & Sadler, 2015). These advancements would encompass the establishment of a guiding vision, scope and content of sustainability assessment and the comprehensive analysis of the essentiality of establishing capacity and continuity for sustainability assessment.
Undertaking significant procedural sustainability assessments aspects
The Canadian should ensure that it identifies which agency will be tasked with the responsibility to carry out the assessment and the relevant stakeholders involved in the whole process. Secondly, it should ensure that I comprehensively outline the stages which every stakeholder/ civil society should be consulted or involved in the chain of environmental assessment initiatives. Likewise, it should focus on establishing effective communication channels which would ensure that the information on environmental assessment is communicated to the right individuals and institutions in record time (Munier, 2014).
Analysis of the political and legal status of the assessment recommendations should be thoroughly carried to ensure that the environmental impact assessment framework is formulated within the expected standards and regulations. Lastly, the stakeholder in this process should be tasked with the responsibility to establish the extent to which the sustainability assessments are embedded and mandated in the existing procedures (Bond, Morrison-Saunders & Pope, 2012).
Identifying and curbing the main difficulties of sustainability assessments
The government should ensure that it identifies and tackles the challenges presented in the course and scope of undertaking the environmental impact assessment process. This would entail operationalizing an environmental assessment framework which gives equal attention to the three main spheres (economic, political and social) and providing adequate attention to the longer term. The process should involve time-to-time comparisons of the various environmental assessment aspects and therefore, the stakeholders should ensure that they assign monetary values to the social and environmental assets (Kasperson & Kasperson, 2011). The proposal should foster reconciliation of the conflicts and gaps between social, environmental and economic goals and hence provide an appropriate platform for political decisions. An effective means of identifying trade-offs should be outlined to ensure that there is presentation of negative and positive assessments in the various spheres on a basis which can facilitate comparison.
Furthermore, there government should ensure a radical measure on the significant changes within the Canadian institutions and society in order to curb the challenges they pose which could influence the directions for, and effectiveness of the environmental assessment in the future. First, this would involve tackling the increasing complexity (Rotmans, 2011). The environmental assessment processes tend to become complex with the growing legal regulations by various jurisdictions. Therefore, there is a growing essence in involving the public in the environmental assessment, and the advancement of the environmental assessment into program and policy planning and development. When the federal fully manages this complexity, it will result in a significant change for the proponents and the government at large.
Secondly, there are financial constraints in the government. The federal and provincial governments are always required to put strategies and mechanisms to recover the costs whenever possible, thereby, increasing efficiencies in environmental assessment administration. When not looked into keenly, dwindling budgets would pose severe consequences from every aspect of the environmental assessment process (Ahmed & Sanchez, 2011). This would include the services delivered by the government and the assigning of the responsibilities among the proponents, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and different communities.
Lastly, the Canadian government should focus on giving more emphasis on non-regulatory measures. As the Canadian government downsizes and privatizes the services and programs of environmental assessment, its role in conducting such environmental assessment is a matter of consideration. There should be alternative approaches to environmental assessments which are formulated and implemented according to national and international standards to eventually replace or augment the conventional regulatory approaches.
The difference in this proposal and the current federal system
This proposal has ensured that there is increased accessibility of the results of environmental assessments by the decision makers in order to ensure that the information provided is synthesized and adopted in the process of decision-making. Unlike, the current federal system in which the policies, framework, approaches and regulations of the environmental assessment programs are not clearly defined and made easily accessible to the public and decision makers to facilitate participation and immediate action whenever necessary, the proposal has restructured the process to broaden the scope of assessments to projects of federal concern and eliminate stricter timelines, thereby encouraging public involvement in the process.. The proposal achieves this by providing the opportunities for the decision makers, for instance, Cabinet Ministers, senior managers, and regulatory authorities to foster an understanding of the limitations and benefits of environmental assessment (Kondyli, 2010). The decision-makers are also given an appropriate platform to communicate the relevant information needs to the environmental assessment practitioners. It has developed curricula which is designated to educate non-environmental technocrats the essence of environmental assessment.
The current federal system has not given the necessary emphasis on the importance of and facilitation of the use of strategic environmental assessment by the decision makers together with their policy advisors. On the other hand, this proposal apart from encouraging adoption of strategic environmental assessment by the policy makers, it further emphasizes on the commitment and accountability among the environmental assessment process for the managers and decision makers of the program.
Moreover, the proposal has highlighted the changes and difference in the federal and provincial roles in environmental assessment while the current federal system has not given such explicit changes. Even though, the current federal system has harmonization standards, this proposal goes ahead and encourages both the harmonization and equivalency or substitution. The proposal gives emphasis on its categorical incorporation of such various options in order to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies. The aspect of equivalency enable the projects to be relieved from the scope of federal environmental assessment process when the provincial process is regarded as adequate and thus allowing the proponents to be able to identify and mitigate the adverse environmental effects (Rotmans, 2011).
Lastly, another critical difference between the current federal system and this proposal is the decision-making process. The proposal gives the most decision-making power to the Minister of Environment. The minister along with the environmental team in the ministry will now determine whether the project has a likelihood to cause adverse environmental effects, and make-decision if the project has to be undertaken through an environmental assessment. Therefore, the Minister determines whether a project is approved and under what conditions.
References
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Bond, A. Morrison-Saunders, A. & Pope, J. (2012). Sustainability assessment: The state of the art. Impact Assess. Proj. Apprais, 30, 53–62.
Dalal-Clayton, B., & Sadler, B. (2015). Strategic Environmental Assessment: A Sourcebook and Reference Guide to International Experience. London: Earthscan.
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