ID: 2218
Presenting Author: Carla Davidson
Session: 725 - After the Assessment – Where’s the Value and What Happened in the End?
Status: pending
Indigenous communities participate in IA to assess potential impacts to rights. IA lacks institutional mechanisms to follow up on predictions, manage cumulative effects, and protect rights.
The Athabasca Oil Sands Region has been the home of several of Canada’s largest Impact Assessments. Indigenous communities have been major outside participants in these reviews, largely because it has become the de facto mechanism for addressing potential impacts to their rights. This offers Indigenous communities a rare insight into a process that is usually between the proponent and the regulator.
The process of IA in Canada, though lengthy, has challenges that lead to distrust of both the process and the information used within it. The biggest challenge is the “so what” question. From the perspective of participating Indigenous communities, Impact Assessment is largely performative, with their key concerns rarely addressed, much less mitigated. There is limited follow up on IA predictions, and no mechanism to address Indigenous concerns around cumulative effects. Indigenous communities therefore feel that while an IA may find potential impacts to their rights, without the institutional or regulatory instruments to mitigate and accommodate these impacts, their participation is largely performative, but necessary to maintain any possibility of judicial review. While the recent amendments to the IA process in Canada have made some welcome changes, without institutional and policy mechanisms to meaningfully follow up on these and manage cumulative effects, the process will continue to fail to meet the needs of Indigenous communities.
As President of Endeavour Scientific Inc. Carla has worked for Indigenous communities in the Oil Sands for 14 years, focusing on methods of examining environmental data to support decision making.
Coauthor 1: Dan Stuckless