Oil and Gas Laws Need Strengthening, not Streamlining
Fix the system before you consider streamlining oil and gas regulations, please! This is the message West Coast Environmental Law and the Sierra Legal Defence Fund delivered to the BC government in response to its Oil and Gas Regulatory Improvement Initiative Discussion Paper.
The steady increase in oil and gas activity in BC is accompanied by regulatory reform by the BC government. In December 2005, the Ministry of Energy and Mines released a set of proposals to further streamline oil and gas laws. The Ministry, which is responsible for promoting oil and gas development while at the same time creating laws to guard against its negative impacts, has released 16 far reaching proposals to consolidate, harmonize, and reduce regulatory requirements for oil and gas development and production.
West Coast and Sierra Legal maintain that before we can consider any of these proposals, more needs to be done to fix the current inadequate system. It does not provide a meaningful role for communities and landowners affected by oil and gas development, and it has not done a good enough job of protecting the environment. As oil and gas development increases, this continued failure to properly regulate the industry poses new risks for British Columbians.
The Discussion Paper does little to address these challenges, and focuses primarily on the ways in which the current regulatory regime is inefficient and is not satisfying the interests of industry stakeholders. While we are pleased to see that the government proposes to strengthen monitoring and enforcement functions, we are concerned that the overriding theme of the proposals is to reduce so-called “red tape” by improving industry access to oil and gas resources.
Our government should not be primarily concerned with increasing access, but with ensuring that we have a regulatory regime that will protect environmental values and human health at a level acceptable to British Columbians. The markets have shown us that the value of this resource is only going to increase – increasing access through diminished regulation, at the expense of communities and the environment will only impoverish us in the long term. The first responsibility of the BC government should be to steward the development of this resource so that it is used responsibly for maximum benefit to British Columbians.
The full brief is available on our website at
www.wcel.org/wcelpub/2006/14248.pdf.
— Karen Campbell
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