any groups are asking the federal government to order
public hearings to review the cumulative environmental impacts
of all the projects and proposals that threaten the sensitive
ocean foreshore area at Roberts Bank under the Canadian Environmental
Assessment Act (CEAA). The combined effect of all
developments on this ecologically sensitive area is exactly the
type of issue that the Act was designed to address. Public
hearings would help identify ways to protect this environment,
for example, by prohibiting or restricting certain types of development,
or by recommending alternatives to current proposals. Alternatives
do exist for the latest contentious project - the Tsawwassen First
Nation's sewage treatment plant for its Tsatsu Shores condominium
development.
Roberts Bank/Boundary Bay is a unique and valuable area. It contains important fish habitat and is home to many birds, including a heron population that the Pacific Wildlife Research Centre describes as unique. A provincial Order in Council recognizes this ecological sensitivity, requiring a mandatory environmental impact assessment for every proposed development in the area that is on provincial land. Yet many of the current crop of proposals, like the Vancouver Port Corporation's expansion, and the developments on First Nations land, come under federal jurisdiction, and should be assessed under the new Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. West Coast Environmental Law Association has been assisting the BC Great Blue Heron Society, the Friends of Boundary Bay and the Tsawwassen Homeowners' Association in their quest to have the federal government hold public hearings on the cumulative impact of all the developments in the area.
The latest environmental threat comes from construction of a sewage treatment plant on the sensitive ocean foreshore on the Tsawwassen First Nation reserve. The Tsawwassen First Nation had originally planned to negotiate an overall servicing agreement with the Municipality of Delta including a provision for sanitary sewer services to the condominium development. When Tsatsu Shores was first proposed, a very cursory environmental impact assessment was done under the old federal law. The first phase of the project was approved before any input from agencies such as Fisheries or Environment was even received, let alone considered. These agencies had serious concerns about the proposal.
At that time environmental groups, concerned citizens and municipal governments asked for public hearings to be held on the environmental impact of all aspects of the Tsatsu Shores development. The federal government denied the numerous requests for hearings and allowed the first phase of the project to proceed, on the understanding that future phases of the development would be subject to more comprehensive reviews. This is a key reason why negotiations between the band and the municipality broke down, and why Delta resolved not to allow the development to be hooked up to the municipal services. The band then decided to construct a tertiary sewage treatment plant on the salt marsh foreshore.
Controversy arose because construction started before any federal environmental assessment of the treatment plant pursuant to CEAA had occurred. The location of the plant may well be harmful to fish habitat according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
An additional complication was the lack of information available about the project. After many inquiries to officials at Environment Canada, the Department of Indian Affairs, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, among others, some answers have been provided. An assessment of this project is now proceeding pursuant to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Documents related to the assessment are now available and can be reviewed at public libraries in Delta and at the Vancouver office of Indian Affairs. The public can participate in this assessment by commenting on the documents that have been made available by the deadline of May 8, 1996. The West Coast Environmental Dispute Resolution Fund has made a grant for legal assistance to the citizens' groups listed above to participate in the assessment.
Some important issues about how CEAA is being applied in this case have still not been sufficiently addressed. WCELA is concerned that construction is proceeding before the assessment has been completed, and before any public input has been considered. CEAA requires an assessment to be conducted "as early as is practicable in the planning stages of the project and before irrevocable decisions are made" (s. 11(1)). It appears that two of the purposes of the Act - that the environmental effects of projects receive careful consideration before responsible authorities take actions in connection with them (s.4(a)) and to ensure that there be an opportunity for public participation in the environmental assessment process (s.4 (d)) - are not being followed. And the inadequacies of the environmental review of the first phase of the condominium development have still not been corrected.
Although there are a number of outstanding legal questions about how CEAA is being interpreted in this case, reducing or eliminating the environmental impacts of the sewage treatment plant is a more immediate problem. A solution is at hand. Instead of locating the treatment plant in this sensitive area, which may harm crucial fish and bird habitat, the option of municipal hookup is still available. The Delta municipal office and the Tsawwassen First Nation should be encouraged to try to work towards an agreement which would avoid the potentially harmful consequences of constructing this plant. This will likely require comprehensive consideration of the impacts of the entire development.
There are many threats to the fragile environment in Roberts Bank. Public hearings convened by the federal government, either alone or jointly with the provincial government, could address potential environmental hazards related to the possible expansion of the ferry terminal, more development by the Vancouver Port Corporation, developments on the Tsawwassen First Nations land, and a planned new agricultural fertilizer facility.
Now that we have new and improved environmental assessment laws, it's time to put them to work. For more information, contact Linda Nowlan at 6853173.
Solving contentious land use disputes in BC is made much more feasible when the competing stakeholders are working from the same maps. This provides common ground, both literally and figuratively. These days, the maps in question are more and more frequently in electronic form. These "digital maps" are manipulated on computers using GIS (geographic information system) software. Governments, resource companies, environmental groups, First Nations groups and many others are rapidly expanding their use of digital maps in the process of defining and resolving land use problems. This is highly desirable, because it forces the parties to discuss issues using a common base of information, rather than allowing each party to simply use its own information to combat the other parties' information.
There is a problem, however. The BC government is using its monopoly on the sale of the digital base maps to charge extremely high prices. Each sector requires digital base maps in order to figure out its own proposals and to present them to other sectors in a usable form. But, the government uses cost recovery to justify astronomically high prices: approximately $30,000 for digital maps of the Clayoquot Sound area requested by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC). While forest and mining companies may be able to pay prices like that, it is clear that such high prices prevent non-profit groups from having access to digital base maps, the common denominator of land use decision-making.
WCWC, represented by WCEL's Bill Andrews, asked the Commissioner of Information and Privacy, David Flaherty, to review the case under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. WCWC was supported in the Inquiry by interventions from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (BC Division), the BC Environmental Network Forest Caucus, the Sierra Club, an SFU map librarian, a professional land surveyor, Ecotrust Canada, the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, and the BC Civil Liberties Association.
On March 11, the Commissioner held (Order 91-1995, March 11, 1996, http://latte.cafe.net/gvc/foi/orders/Order91.html) that the government's refusal to provide WCWC with affordable copies of the digital maps was lawful, but unfair. He urged the government to consider a two-tiered pricing system which would recognize the potential public interest contributions of non-profit groups.
The upcoming provincial election will be a good forum for environmentalists to press all parties to commit to such a system.
It would cost $4.2 million, plus applicable taxes, for a single purchaser outside government to acquire a complete set of mapsheets. It is hard to imagine any single non-governmental environmental organization, or a consortium of all of them, being able to afford such a capital expenditure, plus related costs of updating and actual usage of the data. Similarly, I doubt that any university or college map library in the province, charged with educating a new generation of students to use the latest technology and technological resources, could afford, individually or perhaps even collectively, to purchase a full set ... for training and research purposes. [pp.21-22.]
One of the fundamental goals of the Act is to promote more accountability of government to the public by encouraging greater openness with respect to information held by government. In this sense, it is inconsistent with the Act for an organization such as WCWC not to be able to obtain access to the data in dispute. [p.24]
West Coast Environmental Law has written to federal Environment Minister Sergio Marchi expressing serious concern over the recent financing agreement by the Export Development Corporation (EDC) for the sale of a computer system to the Chinese government to be used for the devastating Three Gorges Dam on China's Yangtze River. The EDC is not currently subject to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and continues to operate with minimal regard for environmental concerns and no regard at all for public input into its decisions.
Many Canadians have been urging the government for years to ensure that international activities financed by the federal government or its agencies are subject to environmental standards no less strict than those applied inside the country. Canada has been a leader in forging new international environmental agreements.
Yet by using taxpayers' dollars to support projects like the Three Gorges Dam, which has been labeled the world's most socially and environmentally destructive dam project, Canada's credibility, reputation and leadership are seriously damaged.
Why is the federal government allowing the EDC to provide financial assistance for such a ruinous project? The World Bank will not support it. The US National Security Council has recommended against support from the US Export-Import Bank based on its opinion that "it would be unwise for the US government to align itself with a project that raises environmental and human rights concerns on the scale of the Three Gorges." Such high levels of international opposition to the project should not be ignored.
The Canadian government should reconsider allowing the EDC to support the Three Gorges Dam project. The government has an obligation to ensure that actions we fund internationally are consistent with standards we espouse at home. The Liberal government has also promised in its Red Book to ensure that environmental and economic signals point the same way, yet financing the Three Gorges Dam would do just the opposite. At a minimum West Coast has asked Minister Marchi and his Cabinet colleagues to require the EDC to hold a formal review, with full public participation, on whether Canadian firms should receive any form of government support for this project. For more information, contact Linda Nowlan at 685-3173.
You can now browse the West Coast Environmental Law library's card catalogue from the comfort of your own desk. The catalogue is available on the Internet, and it is accessible on the World Wide Web from the WCEL home page, at http://vcn.bc.ca/wcel/.
To access the catalogue, click on or select the Card Catalogue item on the WCEL home page. You will be presented with a simple search screen where you can enter one or more search terms. When you press the Search button, you will then be shown the results of your search, in a brief title format. You can then select the titles you wish to see in more detail. By clicking on the View Details button, a full "card" for each selected title will be shown.
In the upcoming weeks, the cards will also be able to take you to the full text or contents of the selected title, if it exists. This opens up many promising possibilities.
For example, these titles do not need to be on WCEL's web pages. This means that the card catalogue can contain entries for documents elsewhere on the web. It also meansthat as new types of documents are created on the Internet, they too can be catalogued - and accessed - through the WCEL card catalogue. Anything that can be referenced with a URL (Uniform Resource Locator - the name for an "address" on the Internet) can be included in the catalogue.
In other words, media that would not normally be associated with the word "document" can now be catalogued and referenced. For example, items such as home pages, images, sound files, video clips, Java (an Internet-based programming language) applications, other databases, 3-D simulations such as VRML "worlds," etc., can all be treated as documents, and hence be catalogued.
The challenge for West Coast will be keeping up with the vast array of information available, and getting it catalogued. If you are interested in volunteering to help us with this work, please call Chris Heald at 684-7378, or by e-mail at cheald@wcel.org.
The online catalogue has been made possible with the help of Communicopia Environmental Communications, of Vancouver, BC.
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