When Assessment Becomes the Obstacle

Across North America, governments are increasingly treating environmental review as something to streamline around rather than a reason to reconsider what we do.

We used to assess first. At least, that was the theory.

Before draining a wetland, damming a river, building a mine, laying a pipeline or releasing industrial wastewater into a watershed, governments were supposed to ask what might happen. Not simply whether the engineering could be made to work. Not whether a permit could be written tightly enough. Not how quickly construction could begin.

What might this do to the water?

What might it do to the land?

What happens to the people living downstream?

What happens twenty years from now?

What else is already happening in the same watershed, airshed or ecosystem?

And, critically:

Is there a reason we should not do this at all?

That last question is what separates an environmental assessment from an approval process.

Increasingly, it is also the question governments seem least interested in asking.

Start with the Athabasca

Alberta has provided a remarkable example.

Suncor is developing plans that could see between 10 and 12 million cubic metres of water taken from tailings ponds at its Base Plant near Fort McMurray each year, treated and released into the Athabasca River. In July, the Alberta Energy Regulator determined that the proposal would not require a provincial environmental impact assessment, according to documents reported by Canada’s National Observer.

To put that number into somewhat more comprehensible terms, 12 million cubic metres is 12 billion litres of water a year.

And this isn’t ordinary wastewater.

Oil-sands process-affected water can contain salts, metals, naphthenic acids, petroleum hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other compounds. The federal government currently prohibits its release as effluent because there is no regulation under the Fisheries Act authorizing it.

That means Suncor cannot simply begin pumping treated tailings water into the river tomorrow.

Federal and provincial governments are still developing standards and regulatory frameworks that could eventually allow treated releases. Alberta says those standards will be science-based and protective of human health and the environment. The province is conducting engagement and developing rules for treatment, monitoring and release.

All of that matters. But so does the question Alberta has decided does not need to be answered through a full environmental impact assessment.

What happens if we deliberately introduce billions of litres of treated oil-sands mine water into the Athabasca River every year?

Not simply whether individual contaminants can be treated below a prescribed number.

Not merely whether a discharge meets a standard at the end of a pipe.

What are the cumulative effects?

What happens over decades?

What happens during periods of low flow?

What happens when multiple mines eventually discharge?

What compounds remain after treatment?

What interactions occur among them?

What happens downstream in the Peace-Athabasca Delta?

What does this mean when added to everything else that watershed has already absorbed?

Those are environmental-assessment questions.

In fact, the federal government’s own work on potential oil-sands effluent regulations acknowledges that the Athabasca watershed is already experiencing cumulative effects and that releases would add to them.

Yet Alberta’s environmental assessment will not be the place where Suncor’s proposal answers them.

That should trouble us even if the eventual treatment technology turns out to be excellent. Perhaps especially then. Because environmental assessment is not supposed to exist only when we already believe something to be dangerous.

It exists because we do not yet know.

A Different Question

The oil sands have a genuine problem. Tailings ponds cannot remain where they are forever.

Alberta says they contain more than 1.5 billion cubic metres of fluid tailings and hundreds of millions of cubic metres of mine water. Mines eventually have to close. Land must eventually be reclaimed. Water has to be managed somehow.

Doing nothing indefinitely is not an environmental solution either.

But notice how easily that practical reality can change the question.

Instead of:

What is the safest way to deal with this problem?

we begin with:

We need to release this water, so what standards will make the release acceptable?

Those are not the same question.

The first allows the evidence to determine the solution.

The second selects the solution and asks science to establish the conditions under which it can proceed.

This is the subtle change in regulatory thinking that deserves far more attention.

The danger isn’t necessarily that governments have stopped measuring things.

They haven’t.

There will still be scientists, studies, licences, limits, monitoring programs, technical reports and regulatory conditions.

The danger is that assessment is gradually being separated from decision-making.

The destination is chosen first. The environmental process is then asked to find the safest route there.

Now Look at Ottawa

On September 3, the federal government amended the regulations that determine which projects are subject to Canada’s Impact Assessment Act.

The changes were published in the Canada Gazette on September 9.

International and interprovincial pipelines are being removed from the federal Project List. So are international and interprovincial electrical transmission lines, certain offshore renewable energy projects, some oil and gas facilities, qualifying in-situ oil-sands facilities and fossil-fuel-fired generating facilities.

Those projects will no longer be subject to the Impact Assessment Act.

It is important to describe what this means accurately.

Ottawa is not saying that every one of these projects will now receive no environmental scrutiny whatsoever.

For projects regulated by the Canada Energy Regulator, the federal government’s argument is that assessment is being transferred to the CER. Ottawa says the CER already considers substantially similar factors, including environmental and cumulative effects, social and economic effects and effects on Indigenous rights.

For other projects, the government points to provincial assessments and other federal regulatory regimes.

There is an uncomfortable bit of history buried beneath Ottawa’s new argument about “duplication.”

The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada was created in 2019 after a national review of the previous system. That review heard concerns about public trust, regulatory capture and the wisdom of allowing industry-specific lifecycle regulators to conduct environmental assessments of the same industries they regulate. Its Expert Panel made a remarkably clear distinction: regulation and assessment are different functions.

The solution it recommended was not to eliminate assessment in the name of efficiency. It was to create a single federal authority whose job was assessment, while drawing on the expertise of regulators such as the Canada Energy Regulator.

Even “avoiding duplication” was part of the mandate that produced that system.

Seven years later, Ottawa is now using duplication as one of the reasons to dismantle parts of it.

The stated objective is efficiency.

• One project. One review.
• Less duplication.
• Greater regulatory certainty.
• Faster decisions.

Those phrases will sound familiar to anyone following major-project policy in Canada. They also deserve closer examination. Because calling two processes “duplicative” tells us nothing about whether they serve the same purpose.

A building inspector and a fire inspector may walk through the same building. That does not make one redundant.

A financial auditor and a workplace-safety inspector may review the same corporation. That does not mean one should absorb the other’s job.

The question isn’t whether two regulatory bodies look at some of the same information.

The question is what each was created to ask.

An impact assessment is supposed to take a broad view of a project’s effects, alternatives, cumulative consequences and public interest. A lifecycle regulator has another relationship with the project. Its role includes regulating the infrastructure through approval, construction, operation and eventual abandonment.

Perhaps the CER can perform both functions perfectly well. But Canada examined that very proposition when it created the current system and concluded that assessment and lifecycle regulation were sufficiently different to warrant an independent assessment authority. If that conclusion has changed, government should explain what changed with it.

Even Ottawa’s own regulatory analysis records concerns raised during consultation that the changes could weaken independent environmental assessment, compress timelines, reduce public participation and allow projects to proceed without a full understanding of long-term environmental consequences. Indigenous participants raised concerns about transparency, fairness, independent review and meaningful participation.

The government concluded the remaining regulatory systems are sufficient.

Maybe they are.

But we should recognize what has happened.

The assessment itself was treated as an administrative burden for which the government sought an efficiency.

The Language Gives It Away

This shift becomes clearer in the language governments use.

Environmental assessment is increasingly described in the vocabulary of obstruction.

• Duplication.
• Delay.
• Red tape.
• Uncertainty.
• Burden.
• Inefficiency.

Once assessment is placed in that category, its success is measured differently.

Fewer days become evidence of improvement. Fewer documents become evidence of improvement. Fewer agencies become evidence of improvement. Lower costs to proponents become evidence of improvement.

Canada’s own regulatory analysis calculates that the new Project List will reduce the number of projects entering the Impact Assessment Act process and explicitly counts reduced documentation requirements as savings to proponents.

None of those things is inherently bad. An environmental assessment should not take ten years because nobody can organize a meeting. Companies should not have to submit identical information five times to five departments.

Regulators should share data.

Deadlines are reasonable.

Processes can absolutely be improved.

But speed is a measure of administrative efficiency. It is not a measure of environmental quality.

A faster assessment may be better. It may also simply be faster.

We Have Seen Where This Thinking Leads

For a preview, look south.

The United States has been going through a much more aggressive restructuring of environmental review.

In 2025, the White House Council on Environmental Quality rescinded the government-wide regulations that had guided implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, for decades. Federal agencies were directed to rewrite their own procedures.

By June 2026, the White House was celebrating what it called historic deregulation of environmental review. It said more than 60 federal agencies and departments had reformed or were reforming their procedures and explicitly promoted what it called a “Categorical Exclusions-First Approach.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed its own NEPA reforms, describing the objective as making reviews faster, clearer and more predictable so that America can build more. Its announcement characterized environmental review as having been used to delay needed roads, bridges, energy and water infrastructure.

For data-centre infrastructure, the White House has instructed federal agencies to identify categorical exclusions that could facilitate construction.

For nuclear development, federal agencies have likewise been directed to streamline, expedite or in some circumstances eliminate environmental reviews where existing authority allows it.

Again, environmental law has not vanished from the United States.

NEPA still exists. Permits still exist. Agencies still conduct reviews.

But the political philosophy surrounding those processes has changed dramatically.

The starting assumption is increasingly that infrastructure must be built quickly and environmental review must fit within that objective.

Canada is not the United States.

Our laws are different. Our constitutional structure is different. Our regulatory changes are not presently as sweeping.

But the language is becoming disturbingly familiar.

Build faster.

Reduce duplication.

Improve certainty.

Streamline approvals.

And eventually the thing standing between the government and a predetermined objective begins to look less like a safeguard and more like an obstacle.

Uncertainty Is the Reason for Assessment

There is a particularly dangerous inversion buried in all of this.

We increasingly hear that projects should not be delayed because environmental consequences are uncertain.

But uncertainty is not an argument against assessment. Uncertainty is the reason assessment exists.

If we knew with absolute certainty that releasing treated tailings water would produce no harmful cumulative effects, there would be little need for an environmental assessment.

If we knew exactly how a pipeline, mine, power plant or data centre would affect every watershed, species, community and future land use, assessment would largely be paperwork.

We assess because we don’t know.

We assess because models can be wrong.

We assess because ecosystems interact in ways individual permits cannot always capture.

We assess because effects accumulate.

We assess because mitigation sometimes fails.

We assess because something considered insignificant in isolation can become significant when repeated twenty times across the same landscape.

And we assess because occasionally the evidence should be capable of producing an answer governments and proponents do not want to hear:

• No.
• Not here.
• Not this way.
• Not at this scale.
• Not until we know more.

Monitoring Is Not Assessment

Another word appears increasingly in these conversations: monitoring.

Approve the activity. Establish limits. Monitor the results. Adapt if problems emerge.

Adaptive management has a legitimate place in environmental regulation. But it cannot replace precaution.

Monitoring tells us what happened after we acted. Assessment is supposed to help us decide whether to act.

That distinction becomes rather important when the receiving environment is a river.

Or an aquifer.

Or an endangered species’ habitat.

Or a community’s drinking-water source.

You cannot always monitor your way back to the condition that existed before the mistake.

Some environmental damage is reversible.

Some is expensive to reverse.

Some takes generations.

Some cannot be reversed at all.

Development Needs Better Assessment, Not Less

None of this requires an anti-development position.

Canada needs infrastructure.

We need electricity.

We need transmission.

We need housing, transportation, mines, communications infrastructure and, whether we like every aspect of their growth or not, data centres.

We also need to reclaim the oil sands.

The existence of a legitimate need does not remove environmental consequences from the equation. It makes understanding them more important.

If Canada is entering an era of accelerated construction, enormous energy demand and rapid industrial change, the rational response should not be to weaken our ability to see what those projects collectively do.
It should be to make environmental assessment better.

Faster where unnecessary bureaucracy exists.

More transparent. Better funded. More scientifically capable. Better able to share information between jurisdictions.

Better at assessing cumulative effects instead of pretending every development exists alone.

Better at incorporating Indigenous knowledge and downstream communities before decisions become effectively irreversible.

Better at saying yes when the evidence supports yes. And still capable of saying no when the evidence says no.

Because an environmental assessment was never supposed to be a ceremony performed after government had decided a project would proceed. It was supposed to inform the decision.

That is the line we should be watching now.

Not whether governments continue to use the words environmental protection. Not whether a regulator still requires monitoring. Not whether proponents still file technical reports. The question is much simpler:

Can the assessment still change the answer?

Because once the answer has already been decided, what remains is not really an environmental assessment.

It is an approval process with environmental conditions attached.

And across North America, we appear to be getting increasingly comfortable with the difference.