Martin Ignasiak writes on why the federal government needs to rethink its entire approach to when and how it assesses major projects, in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Reference re Impact Assessment Act (IAA). Minor amendments aren't going to cut it.
His column appears in Inside Policy, the magazine of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Martin says:
"To put the scope of the Court’s decision into perspective, consider the following. The Court divided the IAA scheme into two distinct parts. The first par—contained in sections 81 to 91 of the IAA—deals only with projects carried out or financed by the federal government on federal lands or outside Canada. As expected, this was upheld by the Court—no one challenged this part of the IAA.
The focus of the Court’s decision was on the rest of the IAA, which deals with the contentious “designated projects” regime. The Court determined that this part of the IAA—“made up of the IAA’s remaining provisions and regulations”—is unconstitutional. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Richard Wagner, stated that “Parliament has plainly overstepped its constitutional competence in enacting this designated projects scheme.” The IAA contains over 150 sections, and the Court only upheld the part created by 11 of those sections—determining the rest to be constitutionally flawed. This alone should have alerted the ministers to the fact that minor legislative amendments aren’t going to address the Court’s concerns with the designated projects regime.
But there’s more. In the course of finding the designated projects scheme unconstitutional, the Court’s opinion struck fatal blows to many of the central and defining aspects of the IAA."
Martin's full article is available here.