The Federal Government To Streamline Environment Assesment Process

Our local MP is defending his government's decision to reduce federal environmental oversight of natural resource developments and other projects by consolidating assessments.

Cypress Hills Grasslands MP David Anderson said they want to make the assessment process quicker and more efficient, “So we've forward with some new proposals. We're trying to move towards a one project one review system that will have set time limits in it so that if projects are going to be approved people will know fairly quickly if they're going ahead. If they're not they'll get that notice as well.”

Anderson adds that one aspect of the changes may have a bigger impact on our area, “Well one of things it might do is there's been a lot of small projects that for some reason the Federal Government has felt obligated to do environmental assessments on. We're trying to cut this down so that we're actually doing environmental assessments on projects that actually have an environmental impact. I think you'll see some smoothing out and hopefully some speeding up of smaller projects.”

He also doesn't believe they are weakening environmental protection and feels if anything they are finding ways to make them stronger -- but quicker.