Major Changes to Environmental Assessments

Canada’s natural resource minister, Joe Oliver, announced major changes to the federal process for environmental approvals of projects.  This action will put into motion the “one project, one review” process. In other words smaller and more standard projects will only need provincial assessments rather than both federal and provincial approvals.  

Changing the approval process will not only save a lot of time (years of paper work) but will also be cost efficient. These changes will directly affect consulting engineering firms within the mining, oil and gas and energy sectors.

As long as projects meet the requirements under the Canadian Environmental Assessment act and are of smaller scale, they can be processed under provincial review. This will free up more space for larger projects under Federal review. Federal environmental assessments will still be needed for large projects that have greater potential for ‘significant adverse environmental effects’. Due to these changes, the time span for review will become significantly less.

In addition, Ottawa is also setting timelines for hearings in order to move approvals along quickly. 24 months for panel review, 18 months for national energy board hearings and 12 months for standard environmental assessments.  

To make things even easier the government has merged the number of organizations responsible for review. Now instead of 40 agencies, there will only be the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, the National Energy Board, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. These major changes to environmental approvals will certainly make the review process as efficient as possible.