According to a document obtained by Greenpeace Canada through an Access to Information request, the current overhaul of Canadaโs environmental protections doesnโt just look like a gift to the oil and gas industry.
A letter dated December 12, 2011 reveals the oil and gas industry made an appeal to Environment Minister Peter Kent and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver requesting they reconsider certain environmental laws in light of โboth economic growth and environmental performance.โ
A letter written by the Energy Framework Initiative (EFI) pointed to several pieces of legislation that, within 10 months time, were axed or significantly altered to favour industrial development. The EFI is an industry group comprised of the countryโs most powerful oil and gas lobby groups including the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Canadian Petroleum Production Institute โ renamed the Canadian Fuels Association, and the Canadian Gas Association. Members of these participating organizations include Enbridge, Suncor, TransCanada, BP Canada, Kinder Morgan, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, and EnCana.
The letter states the โpurpose of our letter is to express our shared views on the near-term opportunities before the government to address regulatory reform for major energy industries in Canada.โ
Six pieces of legislation were mentioned as โoutdatedโ or prohibitive to โshovel ready projectsโ across Canada including the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Species-At-Risk Act, the National Energy Board Act, the Fisheries Act, the Migratory Birds Convention Act, and the Navigable Water Protection Act.
As the CBC reports, โwithin 10 months of the request, the industry had almost everything it wanted.โ
By June 2012, the federal Conservatives had rammed one of the most controversial budget bills in recent history, the 400-page Bill C-38, through a protesting parliament. The entire process was criticized as undemocratic by the opposition, who unanimously opposed the bill and many of its proposed changes to existing environmental law.
With Bill C-38 the Environmental Assessment Act was redrawn. Major, sweeping changes were made to the Fisheries Act and the National Energy Board Act.
By October, the government had tabled a cousin omnibus budget Bill C-45, this one replacing the Navigable Waters Protection Act with much weaker legislation.
According to the EFI, many of Canadaโs environmental statutes are outdated and embody a โphilosophy of prohibiting harmโ rather than โenabling responsible outcomes.โ The existing environmental laws were โimplemented largely in isolation of one another,โ they wrote, creating โfundamentally underlying issuesโ that needed to be addressed.
โโEnvironmentalโ legislation is almost entirely focused on preventing bad things from happeningโ which โresults in a position of adversarial prohibition, rather than enabling collaborative conservation to achieve agreed common goals,โ the letter states.
โRegulatory reform,โ the document concludes, โwas one of the principle challenges identifiedโ for the energy industry โand has been an ongoing priority for the sector as a whole.โ
Greenpeace Canadaโs Keith Stewart told the CBC,
โthe industryโs fingerprints are all over this budget. They got the changes that they wanted and they even put out a press release later thanking the government for making those changes.โ
Chris McCluskey, spokesman for Minister Oliverโs office suggested the โco-operative approach to responsible resource developmentโ was a byproduct of โsuccessive annual meetings of federal and provincial ministers responsible for energy.โ
A recent report by the Polaris Institute shows that industry meetings with the federal government since 2008 outstrip meetings with environmental organizations by 463 percent, suggesting industry played a larger role than perhaps McClusky would like to admit.
