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The number of federally funded infrastructure projects exempted from environmental assessments could soar to nearly 14,000, up from the 2,000 figure the Conservatives announced in March.
The new figure was introduced earlier this week in a Federal Court of Canada case by the Sierra Club of Canada challenging the legality of exemptions. It was based on a disclosure Ottawa made in the Canada Gazette last month indicating that up to an additional 12,000 projects will be approved under the infrastructure program.
The new total suggests the federal cabinet’s decision to limit environmental assessments on infrastructure spending will have far broader effects than was initially thought. The exemption applies to a wide range of projects receiving federal money and includes highway widening, bridges and sewage treatment plants, but also ventures with little or no environmental impacts, such as bike trails and social-housing construction.
“Certainly we were appalled when it was at 2,000 and now we’re at a sevenfold increase. That’s just immense,” said Justin Duncan, a lawyer at Ecojustice, a public interest legal organization that is representing Sierra Club in the case. “Ballooning up to 14,000 certainly provides greater fodder for our case that the federal government is getting out of the [environmental assessment] game.”
The Conservative cabinet passed measures in March to free certain infrastructure expenditures from environmental assessments as a way, the government said, to speed up the beneficial effects of its economic stimulus spending. At the time, a Canada Gazette notice said 2,000 projects would be covered.
But last month, in a new regulatory statement published in the Gazette, it said 8,000 to 12,000 projects will be funded under new programs and “a large number of these projects will be excluded from requiring an environmental assessment as a result of these regulatory amendments.”
Speaking to reporters in Calgary, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice, defended the exemption plan, saying the government “looked at the kinds of projects in the past where environmental assessments had resulted in delay, but not necessarily any improvements and where we felt that duplicative environmental assessments would not be in our best interests.”
The number of projects that will be exempted “isn’t clear, it won’t be clear until we complete the economic action plan,” said Mr. Prentice.