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.

But in the case of offshore oil and gas drilling, it's not an issue, said Annie Roy, a spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

The minister could delegate the "downscoping" authority to the three boards with government-invested power to regulate offshore oil and gas activities in Canada, but scoping has never been an issue for them because they have to regulate the entire drilling process from planning to wrap-up and would have no reason to scope that down, she said.

"It's basically a moot point, as far as we read the act," said Robert Steedman, professional leader of environment with the National Energy Board, which regulates Arctic oil and gas activity. "We don't scope down; we scope the whole project."

If the potential scoping parts of Bill C-9 won't affect offshore oil and gas drilling in Canada, other parts of the environmental assessment sections will.

The changes would affect who leads environmental assessments for certain large-scale projects. Currently, several federal departments are prone to wasting time by debating who does what, said Mr. Prentice.

The changes propose giving the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency the authority to conduct some EAs not done by the National Energy Board or the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The agency has never conducted EAs before. Now, it simply administers the process led by other departments such as Environment Canada or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. With the changes, it would consult heavily with those expert departments, said Ms. Roy. Two offshore petroleum boards that regulate oil and gas activity off the East Coast would give up some of their power over EAs to CEAA.

The government has funnelled millions more to it to ensure it has the resources to take on the new role.

Other EA changes included in the original C-9 would exempt public infrastructure stimulus projects from environmental assessments, to ensure the speedy process of digging the economy out of recession. The environment minister would still have the discretion to compel an EA if necessary.

Altogether, the changes clear up red tape, inefficiencies and delays in the current environmental assessment process, said Mr. Prentice.

But environmental groups argue that pushing those changes through the legislative process within a 900-page budget bill is not the way to do it.

"Here we have these very, very wide ranging and, in our view, counterproductive amendments to [the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act] happening at the very eve of the mandatory parliamentary review of Environmental Assessment Act itself," said Mr. Lindgren.

That review is slated to take place through a Commons committee this fall.

That will take years, argued Sen. Neufeld. The changes proposed have been encouraged for years by successive provincial governments, he said, including his during his eight-year tenure as B.C.'s minister of energy and mines.

Senators are set to debate the removal of the EA sections of C-9 today. The opposition has a slight majority over the government in the Senate. But an earlier vote to split the bill's financial parts from the rest failed when Liberals showed up and voted for the split, but not in strong enough numbers.

What will happen, now that the amended bill is back from committee, is unknown.

The Hill Times