https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says legislative changes in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling last year that curtailed Ottawa’s powers to regulate resource projects could come in next month’s budget.
Last October, the court ruled that the federal government doesn’t have nearly as much jurisdiction to regulate resource projects as it assumed it had under the Constitution. Currently, mines, oil and gas projects and pipelines are regulated based on a roughly 50/50 split between the federal government and the provinces through two separate and often overlapping processes.
Ottawa’s oversight should instead be restricted to certain areas, such as assessing the impact of projects on fisheries, the bird population, species at risk and Indigenous rights, the top court said.
After the ruling, the federal government said it intended to introduce legislation to change the 2019 Impact Assessment Act, but did not say when that could happen. Immediately after the ruling, it was unclear what would happen to dozens of resource companies that had already spent years working on federal impact assessments that were not yet completed. At the time, there were 42 active assessments under way. Ottawa said then it would assess each project on an ad hoc basis, which only added to the confusion.
For the rest of this article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-federal-budget-may-include-legislative-changes-to-streamline/