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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
60 BCBusiness july 2015 T he Skeena is Canada's second- largest salmon river and har- bours all six species of salmon and steelhead. What the Bering Sea is to king crab, the Skeena is to salmon. So when Jonathan Moore read in the environmental assessment application of one Fortune 500 oil and gas company just how few fish the firm's environmental con- sultants reported to find at the mouth of the Skeena—the nursery for the watershed's fish and proposed site for the company's energy project—he was confounded. At the time, one of Moore's graduate stu- dents was researching salmon habitat, along- side Skeena First Nations, in the area of the proposed development in northern B.C. Moore was familiar with the area from time spent sampling fish there. "We would catch more fish in one single net haul than their environmental consultants reported seeing all summer," he says. Moore had recently moved to Vancouver from California to teach and research ecology at SFU. He'd arrived in B.C. excited to live and work in a region that, in contrast to the west- ern states of California, Oregon or Washington, still had thriving wild salmon. Only now he couldn't help but wonder whether B.C. was about to gamble with its healthiest fish stocks, ignorant of the risks. While Moore loves fish, his true allegiance lies with science, and it was the flimsiness of the assessment's conclusions—that the project would have no residual negative effects on fish habitat—that bothered him most: "I didn't see that conclusion being scientifically defensible." It raised a troubling question: If provincial and federal environmental assessment agencies are relying on such insufficient data to inform their permitting and decision-making, then where does that leave the other 109 major pro- posed developments in B.C., whose applications have been submitted to the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office ( EAO) and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA)? Nearly half of all major resource projects across Canada currently being reviewed by CEAA are situated in B.C. While some of those oil-and-gas projects may be deferred until oil prices (and capital investment in the industry) bounce back, an unprecedented scale of devel- opment is already underway. The Chartered Professional Accountants of B.C. reported that capital investment in natural resource indus- try projects in northeast B.C. alone was $29.2 billion as of the end of 2013. Meanwhile, vari- ous proposed LNG projects are expected to cre- ate 100,000 new jobs through 2023, according to a recent WorkBC report. Yet while B.C. may be experiencing a renais- sance in resource development, it also comes at a time when our environmental assessment process is, according to critics, the weakest and most confusing it has been in decades—thanks to abrupt changes in our environmental laws and deep budget cuts to government regula- tory agencies. In 2010, CEAA's annual budget was cut by 40 per cent down to $17 million (meaning that the environmental assessment office for all of Canada has an annual budget less than one-twentieth of Enbridge's regulatory expen- ditures for Northern Gateway). The CEAA cut was followed by radical changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which reduced the scope of public engagement and div vied up responsibility across federal or provincial agencies. The Navigable Waters Protection Act was also replaced by the Navigation Protection Act, which removed federal protec- tion for 98 per cent of all rivers and lakes in Canada. And the Fisheries Act—Canada's oldest and strongest piece of environmental legislation— was rewritten to remove explicit habitat protection for all fish. The end result of all these changes has been an increasingly self-regulating, self-reporting system that's full of grey areas, where discretionary judgment calls are made without any accountability. No one seems happy with the outcome. Environmental groups point to deregulation as evidence of an unbalanced process that favours proponents at the expense of public interest and the environment. Meanwhile, industry groups bemoan high levels of uncertainty under the While B.C. may be experiencing a renaissance in resource development, it also comes at a time when our environmental assessment process is, according to critics, the weakest and most confusing it has been in decades