With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
july 2015 BCBusiness 63 bcbusiness.ca been identified as a factor in the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. "Environmental assessment is our key opportunity to get it right, especially for big projects whose impacts we will have to live with for many, many decades," says Kevin Hanna, a geographer at UBC Okanagan who researches environmental impact assessment policy. Getting it wrong gets expensive, and fast. According to the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory, there are 4,529 contaminated sites in B.C.—the highest number of any prov- ince or territory in the country. Since creating the Crown Contaminated Sites Program ( CCSP) a decade ago, the provincial government has spent $277 million on cleanups, while in the last fiscal year alone, the feds spent $142 mil- lion on contaminated sites in B.C. Many of these sites are the legacy of commercial, indus- trial, mining and waste disposal practices dat- ing back decades, but of the 84 contaminated sites investigated by CCSP, 70 are mine sites. There are many ways to go about an envi- ronmental assessment process, and the way we go about it in Canada is particularly "pro- ponent-driven," according to environmental lawyer and UVic law instructor Mark Haddock. The onus is on the proponent to evaluate the environmental risks of their own project, and it is the regulators' job to judge the merits of their conclusions (the provincial and federal regulators do disagree on their judgments; just look at New Prosperity Mine's proposals that passed the provincial process only to fail at the federal level, twice). Haddock notes that, with all the cutbacks, there are limitations on the ability of government staff to review projects and vet proponents' statements: "So the whole system is highly reliant on the quality and pro- fessional integrity of the assessment being done by the proponent." Of course it's not just pressuring clients, enabled by weakened envi- ronmental laws, who compromise the integrity of the environmental assessment process. The way in which environmental consulting businesses manage themselves can undermine things too. One of the biggest problems cited by several consul- tants is that it's often business or project manag- ers who are put in charge of large environmental consulting contracts—people who might pri- oritize the bottom line over the professional ethics of the professional biologists on their team. "When they start dabbling in the science, things go south pretty fast—especially if they're looking for a certain result," says Trimble. Another trouble spot is how widely the quali- fications and work experience of a firm's staff can vary. "What is classically a huge problem with those huge companies that do [environ- mental] survey work is they send out their most junior people," says Amanda Baker*, an RPBio who works on environmental assessments and has consulted for oil and gas projects, road and bridge building, transmission lines and housing developments across B.C., Saskatchewan and Alberta. Junior staff may be cheaper to send out to do field work, but they're also prone to errors. Baker cites an example of her employ- ees joining wildlife surveys of a larger consult- ing firm and finding their staff were surveying the wrong site. Another consultant shared an instance where she visited a site that wasn't labelled sensitive habitat by more junior scien- tists—only to find listed ducks and frogs hopping around in plain sight. The inexperienced staff simply didn't know their species identification. "Environmental assessment is our key opportunity to get it right, especially for big projects whose impacts we will have to live with for many, many decades" * NOT THE SUBJECT'S REAL NAME