The Infrastructure Projects Act is getting pushback from every corner of the political spectrum it seems. First Nations don’t like it, municipalities are wary of it, some environmental groups have concerns, the Greens oppose it and the BC Conservatives are picking at it in a way that suggests they’re not quite sure what to make of it.
Some energy and resource companies may end up loving Bill 15, because it will help accelerate projects that quality as “designated” and “provincially significant.” Others may bristle at a two-tied regulatory system that ends up fast-tracking a niobium mine over one for metallurgical coal.
Bill 15 and Bill 14 — which exempts renewable energy projects from the environmental assessment process — look like a set of keys government has hastily fashioned in order to get out of the handcuffs it made for itself.
Government includes ones previous to the NDP, because they have all added layers of bureaucracy to what is supposed to strictly be an environmental assessment process, but has turned into a complex web of social licence box-ticking.
The Infrastructure Projects Act gives the minister of infrastructure broad powers to skirt certain regulations and fast-track public works projects — hospitals, bridges, transmission lines — as well as designate private sector and other non-provincial government projects as “provincially significant.”
It is a tacit admission that the regulatory environment in B.C. has become a morass, and Premier David Eby’s government is trying to unstick itself.
The problem is that Bill 15 is so tendentious, it allows any government to play favourites, fast-tracking projects it wants, while projects deemed “controversial” (such as LNG facilities, pipelines, overdose prevention sites and low-barrier housing, according to Infrastructure Minister Bowinn Ma) are left to languish in regulatory limbo.
Even so, LNG developers may be quietly applauding, if not this bill, then Bill 14, which “streamlines” renewable energy project permitting by exempting the North Coast Transmission Line (NCTL) and wind energy projects from the Environmental Assessment Act.
The NCTL is essential to electrifying mines and LNG projects in northwest B.C. If you are going to require industry to decarbonize through electrification, you need power lines, and these can be notoriously time-consuming to get approved.
However, building powerlines and wind farms have environmental impacts. You need to cut down trees to build access roads and distribution cutlines, cross rivers, eat into wildlife habitat. A transmission line, being a linear project, can have many of the same impacts as a pipeline.
There are still environmental regulations that must be followed, but the approval process won’t be as onerous. It will provide tools “to reduce redundancies and duplication, not standards,” said Ma. But only for the projects that are popular.
Understandably, Canadian politicians have watched, with a mix of awe and horror, at how fast and furious U.S. President Donald Trump has moved on a laundry list of issues through executive orders.
Our federal and provincial governments are trying to respond, it seems, by likewise moving swiftly to address permitting sclerosis.
That’s a good thing, if it leads to real deregulation. But this is not deregulation — this is regulatory avoidance, unevenly applied. Eby’s government deems wind farms to be a public good, whereas LNG projects and pipelines are “controversial.” In the hands of a Conservative government, the opposite may be true.
“A future government could choose to use these very definitions and significantly expand the application of these definitions because there are no guardrails,” argued Green MLA Rob Botterell.
This is the danger of an act that lets government pick winners and losers — it could create an uneven playing field, with the goalposts moved at the whim of whoever happens to be in power.
Bills 14 and 15 could help get things moving in B.C., but they are ad hoc measures that need to be followed by real regulatory reform.
Nelson Bennett is BIV’s former resources reporter
