ID: 2141
Presenting Author: Megan Macdonald
Session: 552 - Accelerating with Integrity: Strengthening Social Impact Assessment in the face of urgency and misinformation
Status: pending
This paper explores how SIA can responsibly advance projects amid strained health and social systems, highlighting proponent roles in effective mitigation and transparency.
With the federal government advancing infrastructure and resource development through legislation such as the Building Canada Act, Social Impact Assessment (SIA) practitioners and proponents face growing pressure to move projects forward. At the same time, social systems across Canada, such as childcare, housing, and healthcare, are strained, and research shows that industrial development can further burden these services (Oke et al. 2024). This creates a key challenge in SIA: how can development deliver economic benefits without undermining the very systems that sustain community wellbeing? This paper examines healthcare as an example to examine how SIA practitioners, regulators, and project proponents can uphold good practice where economic urgency meets limited health-system capacity. Drawing on Northern Health’s Assessing Health Impacts of Industrial Development report and recent analyses of rural health strain, it explores proponent responsibilities for mitigation, including on-site health supports, workforce strategies, and the inclusion of health-service indicators in Socio-Economic Effect Management Plans (SEEMPs). The paper discusses strategies to maintain transparency, counter misinformation, and balance economic urgency with social sustainability, asking: how can project proponents contribute to responsible development that reduces socio-economic effects on already strained systems?
Megan is a socio-economic practitioner with Stantec Consulting Ltd. with four years experience in SIA and an interest in the human environment.