Canada West Foundation Blog

By: Robert Roach

A new report released by the Canada West Foundation today summarizes interviews with 23 of the leading minds on how to marry resource development with environmental protection. Keeping Pace: Improving Environmental Decision-Making in Canada is based on input from former senior bureaucrats, former environment ministers, internationally renowned scientists, natural resource industry representatives and ENGO leaders. From former federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice and internationally-recognized scientist David Schindler to original founding member of Greenpeace Patrick Moore and Suncor VP Gordon Lambert, the combined experience with environmental decision-making among interview participants totals well over 400 years.

Considering the diverse background of these Canadian thought leaders there was surprising agreement, especially on three overarching themes:

First, everyone agreed that environmental decision-making in Canada needs improvement—full stop. We are not at the top of our game when it comes to environmental stewardship in the resource sector.

Second, improving environmental decision-making is not about fixing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the National Energy Board, the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board, BC Environment or some other government department or regulatory agency. Environmental decision-making has to be viewed in a broader policy context. Some changes are needed to the regulatory framework, but it is a small piece of the pie.

Unfortunately the regulatory framework is taking the brunt of the criticism right now. It shouldn’t. Other components of the decision-making process such as regional plans, monitoring and compliance, strategic plans, clear goals and objectives, political leadership, meaningful consultation/collaboration are much more important. These elements have not kept pace with the public interest.

Third, we have moved from a relatively simple world into a much more complex one. The difference was described as a shift from “environmental challenges 1.0 to 2.0.” The 2.0 label has been famously applied to the World Wide Web to highlight the shift from passive viewing of websites (Web 1.0) to active online interaction and collaboration (Web 2.0). The web has gone from emails, news groups, desktop computers and basic websites to eBay, PayPal, instant messaging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, 500,000+ apps, mobile Internet devices and cloud programming. Environmental challenges have gone from a relatively straightforward set of problems and solutions to situations characterized by a wide range of stakeholders, heated rhetoric, competing scientific claims, incomplete information and responses that require broad social change and/or significant economic costs. Hence, we need to upgrade our environmental decision-making mechanisms.

You can download this timely new report for free from the Canada West Foundation website by clicking here.

By: Robert Roach

The federal government recently announced a “Plan for Responsible Resource Development” that will streamline the federal regulatory review process. While this is a step in the right direction, a report from the Canada West Foundation being published on May 3 argues that the task at hand is much larger. Keeping Pace: Improving Environmental Decision-Making in Canada reveals an environmental decision-making process that, while one of the best in the world, is dogged by a number of significant shortcomings. These weaknesses include insufficient integration of scientific research; a lack of clarity regarding exactly what trade-offs between environmental protection and economic development are acceptable to the government of the day; and the ongoing need to ensure that the various government departments and agencies at the federal and provincial levels are cooperating as much as possible.

You can download this timely new report for free from the Canada West Foundation website on Thursday.

By: Dr. Roslyn Kunin

Over the years, I have spoken with many people who were planning on starting their own business. They told me about the great product or service they would offer. They described how they would set up the business. They all told me how much money they hoped to be making once the business got rolling.

What they never mentioned, until they were prompted, were customers. That basic business need, someone willing and able to pay for the good or service provided was, if not totally missing from the mental image of the new business, certainly not in the foreground.

We should not be too hard on these aspiring entrepreneurs for not thinking about who was going to buy their output. For a very long time, governments, policymakers, planners and others interested in economic development did the same thing. Some still do so.

Take western Canada as an example. When we think about advancing our economy, we think about inputs. These include our resources and how we can access and develop them. They include infrastructure; transportation, communication, etc. They definitely include human capital—a workforce with both hard and soft skills and, ideally, some relevant experience.

We think about what we might produce. In the past, the focus has been around the question of how the West can move up the food chain beyond its traditional, resource-based industries and into manufacturing and the newer technologies.

What we have not been thinking about is customers. Who is going to want whatever it is we are or might be producing? For too long, we have had an “if you build it, they will come” attitude. But that only happens in the movies.

Relative to much of the rest of the world, western Canada is blessed with various essential resources, an educated labour force, decent infrastructure and political stability. But we are seriously limited by our lack of customers. We have been, and still are, far too dependent on one customer—the United States.

If you have only one customer, the US is a good one to have. It is close, big, speaks English and has similar laws and customs. But it exposes you to the risk of having all your eggs in one basket. We learned this to our sorrow in the last downturn.

To advance western Canada, we need more customers, and those potential customers are sitting across the Pacific and beginning to creep into our awareness. They want, need and can afford the resources and high level services that we can provide.

So let us adjust our focus to look west as well as south. Let us develop the pipelines and other infrastructure needed to serve new markets. Let us develop and add to our customer base. That is how businesses and economies grow.

With increasing food and energy prices, a growing world population and the potential effects of climate change, water—and how it is managed—is more important than ever. A new publication by the Canada West Foundation delves into the views of water policy experts across the West to determine key highlights and priorities for our water future. 

Wave of the Future: Water Policy in Western Canada by Dr. Roger Gibbins and Larissa Sommerfeld highlights viewpoints from over 50 individuals across the West with a background in water management, governance or the study of water, brought together by the Canada West Foundation for the Honourable James A. Richardson Discovery Roundtables. As a result of these discussions, it was obvious that water experts have similar priorities.

“Canada needs to take a long-term approach to planning water policy,” advises Dr. Gibbins. “In addition to ensuring that policy developments progress in a timely matter, we also need to appropriately value this natural capital while increasing public awareness about water issues.”

Our water has the potential to be a challenging issue for western Canada in the coming years, yet the participants at the spring 2011 James A. Richardson Discovery Roundtables shared a general sense of optimism. Although there are challenges that lie ahead with this resource and how we can best manage it, decision-makers should recognize that addressing any one of the priorities highlighted will be a step in the right direction.

The Honourable James A. Richardson Discovery Roundtables were launched in 2006 to seek out new thinking to strengthen the voice of western Canadians and gain a sense of policy challenges to come. The annual roundtables are designed to engage a small group of individuals with a background in, and a passion for, the topic under discussion. In the spring of 2011, the Roundtables featured water and were held in Victoria, Lethbridge, Saskatoon and Winnipeg. 

Click here to download a copy of Wave of the Future: Water Policy in Western Canada.

“The People and the deer fused in my mind, an entity. I found I could not think of one without the other, and so by accident I stumbled on the secret of the Ihalmiut.”

I was reminded of this quote from Farley Mowat’s book, People of the Deer, when reading about the debate currently taking place over the impact of seismic testing on the marine wildlife in Lancaster Sound and, by extension, the northern communities that rely on that wildlife.

The connectedness of people with their natural environment, including the wildlife, is important and something you can’t put a price on. This was the message of Nunavut judge Sue Cooper and one of the reasons why she blocked a seismic study of Lancaster Sound. She states, “The loss extends not just to the loss of a food source, but to loss of a culture. No amount of money can compensate for such loss.”

Lancaster Sound is a body of water north of Baffin Island in Nunavut that is rich with marine wildlife. It is the home of narwhal, walrus, beluga whales, seals and polar bears and is an important migratory route. The abundance of life is so substantial there it has been dubbed the “Arctic Serengeti.” It is also an area that has yet to be explored in terms of its mineral and resource wealth.

That is the aim of Natural Resources Canada, which is interested in conducting a geo-mapping program in order to “increase our knowledge of the geology of the North.” This seismic involves firing an air gun underwater to gather data. This process, they say, presents very little risk to wildlife. The Inuit, however, disagree and argue that previous seismic testing resulted in death and hearing damage to wildlife, and caused whales to alter their migratory route.

Many important questions remain unanswered in this case, including: What is the scientific evidence of the impact of seismic on wildlife? Was the consultation process with the potentially impacted communities sufficient? And, what is the intended use of the geological knowledge obtained through this seismic testing?

What is interesting to me isn’t whether blocking the seismic was a good or bad decision. What’s interesting is that there was an acknowledgement of the larger philosophical concept that place matters—that individuals, communities and cultures’ sense of self is informed by their natural environment and you can’t impact that environment without impacting the people within it.

It is easy to forget sometimes that the value of the natural environment can’t be readily quantified in economic terms—although various solutions from Bentham’s utilitarianism to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness indicator have been attempted. The valuation difficulties are not easily overcome, as the case of Lancaster Sound illustrates. It is possible to conduct seismic testing to learn about the type, quality and quantity of mineral deposits on the bed of the Arctic Sea and assign a numeric value to it; but, is it possible to assign a price to the value of a preserved natural environment to the culture and identity of the Inuit?

Having a connection with nature is important for all people, not just aboriginals or northerners. A love of nature is one of the few things that unites all Canadians. For example, 98% of Canadians state that they view nature in all its variety as essential to human survival, 90% consider time spent in nature as children as very important and 82% say nature has very important spiritual qualities for them personally (Environics International, 1999).

This connection, or bond, with the natural world is especially significant for western Canadians whose psyche and character are informed by the expansive lakes of Manitoba, the broad prairies of Saskatchewan, the jagged teeth of Alberta’s mountains and the rhythmic ocean on British Columbia’s shores.

This means that whenever we disrupt the natural environment we need to be asking: what is the impact of a disrupted, polluted or otherwise unhealthy natural environment on our sense of self and community? Or, to put it another way, if you woke up tomorrow and the salmon stock had collapsed, the lakes were too polluted to swim or boat in and grizzly bears were extinct, how would that impact your understanding of what it means to be western Canadian?

As we search for the correct balancing point between economic development and environmental conservation as a region and a nation, we need to keep in mind that the natural world matters to our sense of self. Although both the economy and the environment are important there are some variables, such as identity, that you can’t readily put a price on. As Mowat notes, identity and nature are fused, they are an entity.