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Federal Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi has defended Bill C-69, the proposed replacement for Canada’s environmental impact assessment process, by hailing the greater degree of regulatory certainty it would bring. His various approbations of the bill are directly contradicted by industry groups, regulatory lawyers and many Canadian First Nations. They have cogently argued that the bill does nothing to fix the current uncertainty, creates new uncertainty in how to fulfill the assessment requirements and invites new litigation without precedent.
And so Sohi’s words of reassurance and a toonie might get you a litre of regular unleaded gas in Vancouver, but no pipelines.
Dangerously naive is the federal contention that additional legal requirements, new consultation obligations, discretionary decisions and the elimination of previous precedent will somehow speed up or bring clarity to the process. It seems to be the product of ivory tower drafters who have not faced down the kind of opposition-at-any-cost effort that halted Trans Mountain.
There is a great economic risk to Canada’s resource sector if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau barrels ahead with this new mess. Sadly, one gets the sense that no matter how beset the feds are with well-considered challenges to C-69 — the latest of which came so compellingly from new Alberta Premier Jason Kenney — they do not want to hear the ends of any of their critics’ sentences.
More serious still is what Bill C-69 and yet another parliamentary peach, Bill C-48, the B.C. tanker ban, will do to national unity if they become the law of the land.
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