Ottawa’s environmental regulations stifling Ottawa’s environmental agenda

Under the Trudeau government of the last nine years, Canada has been locked into an extreme regime of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission controls meant to make Canada a “net-zero” emitter of GHGs by 2050, meaning Canada cannot emit more GHG into the air than Canada’s forests, agriculture and ecosystems draw out of the air on an annual basis.

The net-zero framework has generated a hydra of regulatory schemes including the replacement of existing fossil-fuel electricity generation with low or no-carbon emitting electrical generation such as wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power.

But there’s a problem—and it’s a problem of government’s own making.

According to the Canada Electricity Advisory Council, an expert council that provided advice to the federal government, Canada’s environmental regulatory systems are impeding the construction of new renewable energy projects just like they impeded conventional energy projects (e.g. pipelines). Canada, the council observed, must add 10 gigawatts of energy every year between now and 2050. For context, in 2022 Ontario’s Bruce Nuclear Generating Station generated about 0.65 gigawatts. If the new building was all nuclear, Canada would need to build about 1.5 Bruce equivalents every year from now to 2050, not to mention all the transmission infrastructure to move that power to users.

That’s a lot of building. And a lot of regulatory barriers to overcome. As the Council noted, Canada has a problem with issuing permits to get things built. In 2019, Canada ranked second-worst in the OECD for time required to obtain a general construction permit. And from 2006 to 2019, Canada fell from fourth to 22nd place in the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” rankings. Federal project approvals for electricity typically take 49 months for new generation projects and 38 months for transmission projects. And that’s for the federal review process only; it doesn’t count provincial and municipal processes, which can be equally time-consuming.

To address this problem, the council suggested (unironically) regulatory reforms strikingly similar to the reforms proposed by critics of environmental regulations in Canada’s extractive, manufacturing and construction sectors for decades. “To reduce overlap and duplication and expedite project reviews, approvals and permitting,” said the council, “Canada’s federal government must eliminate areas of redundancy between its departments, and between federal and other levels of government, while providing clear direction on how to respect Indigenous rights. These measures would shorten approval timelines for federal review.”

The council called on government to establish a “champion” for regulatory streamlining, amend the impact assessment process to take a “risk-based” approach limited to project or site-specific risks, establish a one-project-one-assessment mandate, shorten the review times allotted to all federal approval processes associated with net-zero projects, and implement rigid maximum approval timeline requirements.

These are all great ideas, and they’re also the same ideas put forward to allow for the construction of conventional energy projects such as oil and gas pipelines and production facilities, not to mention mining projects for metals and minerals across Canada.

If the Trudeau government is serious about achieving its renewable energy transition, it should implement the council’s regulatory reform recommendations. But if the government is interested in more than just renewables, and wants the entire Canadian economy to flourish, it should implement the same regulatory reforms across the entire Canadian economy, not one slice that’s currently popular.