Building Faster, Knowing Earlier: Regulatory Efficiency in Impact Assessment

Canada wants to build faster. And I kinda get it.

We are living through a moment of profound economic uncertainty, shifting trade relationships, infrastructure deficits, growing demand for critical minerals and energy, housing pressures, and a geopolitical environment that is a bit of a hot mess, to say the least, forcing countries to think very differently about resilience and self-sufficiency.

There is urgency here, and I don't think those of us working in planning, impact assessment, community engagement, or environmental protection do ourselves any favours by pretending there isn't. Yes, there are consequences to building poorly, absolutely; and there are also consequences to not building at all. Communities need housing. Nations are pursuing economic opportunities. Infrastructure is aging. Energy systems need to change. Transportation networks need investments. People need jobs. Canada needs to figure out how to get important things built.

So, when I read the federal government's proposed changes to how major projects are reviewed and approved, my instinct isn't simply to say, “slow down.” In fact, some of what is being proposed through Bill C-39 sort of makes a great deal of sense to me. A longer process is never automatically a better process. And yes, what comes next may be a hot take, but stay with me: there's more here.

Asking an Indigenous Nation to explain the same concerns to several different departments doesn't somehow make consultation more meaningful. A technical review sitting in someone's inbox for six months certainly doesn't make an impact assessment more rigorous. Eight field seasons counting birds again when another entity is counting the same birds in the same study area doesn't necessarily make the dataset more rigorous. A multi-year process filled with duplication, unclear responsibilities, sequential reviews, and bureaucratic hand-offs is not inherently more democratic, more ethical, or more thoughtful than one that takes considerably less time.

If we can remove that kind of delay, we should. But my burning question is: what, exactly, are we trying to accelerate?

When we talk about making major-project decisions faster, we tend to talk about time as though all time inside an impact assessment process is the same. It isn't. Let me explain:

We should definitely be ruthless about reducing administrative time, but I'm not sure we can simply compress knowledge building and relational time. We can run technical reviews concurrently. We can create one federal doorway rather than asking communities to navigate a maze of agencies. We can clarify responsibility at the beginning of a process instead of discovering six months later that everyone thought someone else was handling it (this drives me up the wall how frequently it happens). Those are design problems, and design problems can be fixed. But rebuilding trust after generations of conflict does not necessarily happen faster because a regulatory clock says it should. Neither does understanding cumulative effects on a territory. Nor does the sharing of Indigenous knowledge, community deliberation, or understanding how a project may reshape housing, livelihoods, safety, culture, identity, relationships to land, and relationships between people.

And as any of the Elders might tell you, consent certainly cannot simply be fitted into whatever time the Crown decides. We can't confuse the inefficiency of our systems with the complexity of what those systems are meant to understand. They're not the same problem!

This is where I think the conversation gets a little more interesting.

What if faster project decisions don't require us to know less? What if they require us to know more, earlier?

This is where regional assessments and strategic environmental assessments become extraordinarily important. Imagine if communities were not asked to rediscover their territory every time another mine, road, transmission line, or energy project appeared, and if much of that work had already begun long before a proponent arrived with a project description and a consultation schedule.

What does this landscape need in order to remain whole? Where are its ecological thresholds? Which places carry cultural, spiritual, or historical significance? And where might development be appropriate, and where might it not be? What kinds of development do communities actually want? What happens when five projects that appear individually manageable occupy the same watershed? What happens to housing when hundreds of workers arrive? What happens to harvesting, community safety, governance capacity, or social cohesion? These aren't questions we should be discovering for the first time because someone has submitted a project.

Done well, regional and strategic assessment could move us away from repeatedly asking communities to react to development and toward something much closer to actual planning. We would understand something about the landscape before deciding how to differently relate to it through new infrastructure.

Individual project decisions could then indeed move faster because we did more of the thinking before the regulatory clock started ticking, instead of looking for shortcuts once the process started.

And yes, those of us in impact assessment have been saying this forever. For some bizarre reason, we just haven't managed the mic-drop moment I wish we'd had before global trade relations went sideways. But maybe this is the moment to finally listen.

There is a similar opportunity in the proposal to coordinate Crown consultation.

The idea that an Indigenous Nation should not have to navigate multiple federal processes around the same project is, to me, reasonable. But coordination cannot become compression. A single consultation process cannot become a single consultation event.

A Nation may need to talk about treaty rights, fish habitat, land back, sacred places, harvesting, economic sovereignty through revenue sharing, cumulative effects, cultural resurgence, and community safety. Those things intersect, but they are not interchangeable.

Perhaps what we need is “one doorway, many rooms,” or whatever other fancy phrase we want to call the idea. As someone who sits at negotiation tables watching my clients get directed from one Ministry to another, provincial to federal, only to experience a cabinet shuffle, a different fancy title, a new portfolio, and suddenly another relationship that needs rebuilding, I can tell you it is exhausting. And I'm just the negotiator in the room!

Imagine the frustration for communities living the shuffle in every file, for decades. This kind of inefficiency consumes precisely the kind of time we should be protecting. Good streamlining could mean communities have a single point of entry while government holds responsibility for coordinating its own bureaucracy.

That is different from asking communities to squeeze everything they need to say through one narrow process. Making the doorway easier to find is efficiency. Eliminating rooms in the name of efficiency is a shortcut. And I don't need to tell anyone working in this space what shortcuts do to trust.

This, to me, is where the conversation needs to land. If Canada wants projects to move faster, then let's get serious about where the time actually goes. Faster assessment should not mean taking everything we currently do and simply demanding that people do it in less time. It should mean redesigning the system. I think there are three places to start (I would love to hear from my fellow practitioners where else we might start):

Cut what wastes time. Move what can happen earlier. Protect what actually needs time. That is a version of regulatory efficiency I can get behind. Canada needs to build faster, yes. Let's also build our capacity to make good decisions faster.