Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. The government has created a catch-22 in the competitiveness review.

It is extremely vague on expectations for changes in environmental regulations, yet only a 90-day period is allowed for a response from the task force on how changes are supposed to take place, so no detail, no context, but make changes in 90 days. To the Minister of Environment: is there support for increased funding for environmental impact assessments on the front end? If the government is serious about increasing development in the oil and gas sector, this is where the system bottlenecks.

Mr. Renner: Well, Mr. Speaker, yesterday we talked about the role that Alberta Environment will play in the regulatory review. The member brings forward a very important point. The whole issue of how we conduct an environmental assessment I think has to be considered in the context of whether or not we are making unnecessary duplication. I do think that that’s an area that we would like to move forward on to look at how we do environmental assessments in that context.

The Speaker: The hon. member.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much. Is the minister saying that he’s looking at downgrading the environmental impact assessments or somehow lessening the requirements for them?

Mr. Renner: No. I’m saying, Mr. Speaker, that if you do things the same way, you should probably expect the same outcomes. We would like to improve our outcomes. So I’m saying that there may be opportunities for us to do environmental assessments from the perspective of determining what is more global in nature. Can we have 15 volumes of data that are generated in environmental assessment that are more generic in nature and then concentrate our efforts on those aspects of that environmental assessment that would apply to any particular application and do that in more detail?

The Speaker: The hon. member.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much. Back to the same minister: what is the factual basis for stating in the review that there can be cost savings without negatively impacting the environment?

Mr. Renner: Well, I gave her a very good example yesterday when I talked about the fact that we can avoid unnecessary duplication. The line of questioning that we just were in is a very good example. Is it necessary to do over and over and over again environmental assessments that cover the same information? Or should we, in fact, be concentrating our energies on those aspects of that assessment that pertain to an individual application and enhancing the amount of background and research information for those aspects rather than duplicating over and over multiple kinds of information that’s not necessary?

Alberta Hansard, March 16, 2010

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