Canada Is Moving Major-Project Review Into the Lifecycle Regulator

Canada has changed who carries the federal assessment of several major energy projects. Amendments registered on 3 September and announced on 9 September remove interprovincial and international pipelines, power lines and some offshore renewable projects from the Project List under the Impact Assessment Act. Projects regulated under the Canadian Energy Regulator Act will instead be reviewed by the Canada Energy Regulator.

The change is presented as an end to duplication. Since 2019, projects in these classes could have been assessed through an integrated review panel that combined Impact Assessment Act requirements with the regulator’s licensing process. The federal regulatory analysis says no such integrated panel assessment has actually been conducted for them. It also argues that the regulator already considers substantially the same environmental, health, social, economic and Indigenous-rights factors.

The practical change is still substantial. Review responsibility no longer sits across two federal institutions for these projects. It moves into the body that will also regulate construction, operation, closure and abandonment. That can create continuity, but continuity is useful only if the record made at approval remains visible and enforceable throughout the asset’s life.

One process must still contain several kinds of judgment

A pipeline or transmission line is not merely a technical asset awaiting a licence. It can alter land use, water, habitat, emissions, employment, community safety and the exercise of Indigenous rights. A single-regulator model does not make those effects less varied. It concentrates responsibility for seeing them together.

The Canada Energy Regulator has relevant advantages. It holds specialist knowledge of cross-border and interprovincial infrastructure. It can connect approval conditions with inspections, compliance action and eventual decommissioning. Information generated during assessment need not be handed from a temporary panel to a separate operating regulator.

That same concentration creates the central assurance question. An institution accustomed to regulating a sector must demonstrate that its project review is broad enough to test whether a project should proceed, not only how it should operate. The standard cannot be inferred from the name of the process. It must be visible in the scope of evidence, the treatment of alternatives and cumulative effects, and the reasons given for a decision.

The projects leaving the list are not one category

The amendments also remove in-situ oil-sands facilities and fossil-fuelled power stations from the Project List. The stated reasoning differs from the transfer of regulator-led projects. Oil-sands entries had applied only in provinces without legislation limiting greenhouse-gas emissions, while fossil power projects entering the federal process had generally been screened out before comprehensive assessment or addressed through other regimes.

Those projects will remain subject to provincial and applicable federal rules. That does not make the new boundary self-executing. The reform relies on other institutions actually covering the effects that the federal Project List no longer captures. Public confidence will depend on clear maps of which authority considers climate, water, biodiversity, cumulative impacts and remediation obligations in each jurisdiction.

The federal analysis estimates that seven or eight projects a year will enter the Impact Assessment Act process after the change, compared with about ten under the previous list. That is not a dramatic numerical reduction. The more important effect is that responsibility becomes less shared. If a material issue is missed, there will be less room to assume another federal process will catch it.

Speed will be measured through the quality of the handoff

The government’s wider objective is to make major-project decisions within two years. Shorter pathways can reduce uncertainty, especially when two processes ask for the same evidence. But a faster timetable does not by itself show that duplication has been removed rather than scrutiny compressed.

The first projects under the revised arrangement should therefore be treated as an institutional test. The regulator should publish a traceable account of how assessment factors, Indigenous knowledge, public submissions and technical evidence affect conditions and decisions. It should also show how those conditions move into monitoring, enforcement and closure planning.

Canada has simplified the federal map. It has not simplified the projects. The reform will be credible if one regulator can hold the full public-interest question and the full asset lifecycle in the same line of sight. If important effects disappear between jurisdictions or behind a shorter timetable, the country will have reduced process without reducing risk.