Environmental groups say if environmental assessment changes are brought back into the government’s final sweeping omnibus budget bill, C-9, they will weaken the EA process by giving the federal environment minister the power to scope down offshore oil drilling projects to only study a fraction of operations.

“In the wake of the BP oil disaster, do you Senators really want to be remembered as the reason we reduced the ability for Canadians to review environmental energy projects?” Green Party Leader Elizabeth May pleaded with members of the Senate National Finance Committee at one of last week’s marathon sittings on Bill C-9, focused on the proposed environmental assessment changes included within it.

No, said Liberal Senators. They later succeeded in amending the bill by taking out environmental assessment and other controversial parts that some observers have said are not directly financially related.

But they could potentially still be reinserted into the bill when the Senate votes Monday or Tuesday to accept the committee’s amendments at report stage.

The risk of passing the proposed changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment into law are many, said Ms. May, speaking as a concerned citizen and not on behalf of her party. A host of other environmental groups appeared before the National Finance Committee.

One of their main problems is that the environment minister Jim Prentice (Calgary Centre-North, Alta.) would have new power to “downscope” the environmental assessment of a project. Instead of a study of the potential environmental impacts of an entire project, the minister could narrow it to only one small part.

“There would be nothing stopping the minister to say for this offshore facility [for instance,] ‘Don’t look at the alternative, don’t look at greenhouse gases, don’t look at contingency plans. Let’s just focus on, let’s say, wastewater discharges or the onboard storage or loading facilities, or just look at impacts on fish,” said Richard Lindgren, a lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association. “What is supposed to be a very rigorous process is so narrow and so meaningless that we’re not going to be getting at where we should be, which is: at the end of the day, can we make an informed decision on what the overall impacts would be and whether this thing should go forward?”

Too much discretion would be given to the minister to decide the nature of the EA, said Alberta Liberal Senator Tommy Banks.

Plus, said Mr. Lindgren, the revised law would fly in the face of a Supreme Court of Canada ruling earlier this year that indicated that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act doesn’t provide the authority to scope down projects.

Not so, Mr. Prentice told the committee.

“[The proposed changes] are not…an attempt to overturn the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada,” he said. “They are not a return to the past where any officials in any department could downscope or narrow a project. Instead, the bill proposes that authority to properly scope a project would flow through the minister of the environment. To ensure transparency, the minister is required to set public conditions on the use of this authority. I do not intend to use these provisions to weaken the environmental assessment process.”

And, argued Conservative Senator Richard Neufeld from British Columbia, why would he?

“The minister of the environment, I don’t care what government it is, is not going to take a huge oil sands project and say: ‘Look, the only thing we’re going to look at is a bridge.’ Elizabeth May, all the environmental agencies—in B.C. we have over 600 registered—let me tell you, they would be on that quicker than you can wink,” he said.

The scoping changes would affect environmental assessments not only for oil and gas projects, but also oil sands and other large projects.

Continue to full article via Canada’s environment threatened by regressive changes in omnibus budget bill, say critics | The Hill Times – Canada’s Politics and Government Newsweekly.