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Environmental black-eye in Alberta Agency jointly funded by province, industry to monitor oil sands environmental impact labeled ‘failed experiment,’ now disbanded By GARY PARK For Petroleum News
It took years and cost tens of millions of dollars to produce what was acclaimed as a world-class agency to monitor the environmental impact of Alberta’s oil sands.
The end result was supposed to be an end to arguments that the Alberta government was biased in favor of the industry.
Instead, the effort has been labeled as a “failed experiment” ending up on the shredding floor while fingers of blame point in all directions.
What is irreversible is a decision by Environment Minister Shannon Phillips to disband the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency that was created in 2012 by the defeated Progressive Conservative government.
Under the new system, the province will retain AEMERA’s independent scientific review panel, which, under the leadership of a chief scientist, will report directly to Phillips’ department.
The panel will advise the chief scientist about what to monitor and how often to do so and will report on the findings.
“In the past there have been questions about the credibility and transparency of this work,” Phillips said. “Environmental monitoring will now take its place alongside public safety and public health as part of the core business of government.”
She said that outsourcing the work had created duplication and scientific fragmentation and wasted money.
Independent report critical The announcement came on the heels of an independent report that described AEMERA as needlessly expensive, poorly coordinated and divided by bureaucratic infighting.
“It is hard to escape the conclusion that AEMERA is a failed experiment in outsourcing a core responsibility of government to an arm’s-length body,” said report author Paul Boothe, a policy and management expert from the University of Western Ontario’s School of Business.
In one of the most damning indictments of a government initiative, he said three years and tens of millions of dollars have resulted in an organization “that is still struggling to get established, dysfunctional relationships with its two key partners” and a failure by all to “realize the promise of the plan to bring critically needed, world-class environmental monitoring to Alberta’s oil sands.”
At stake is Alberta’s global campaign to sell a message that it is a world leader in lowering the environmental impact of oil sands development by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Joint coordination the plan The 2012 plan was designed to bring Alberta scientists together with resources from Environment Canada to jointly coordinate a study of the industry’s affect on the region’s air, land and water.
The resulting agency was funded by C$50 million from industry and another C$28 million from Alberta.
Boothe’s report said the funding agreement expired a year ago and has never been renewed “in part because of AEMERA’s unwillingness to accept (Environment Canada) as an equal partner in oil sands monitoring.”
He also wrote that costs were higher than expected because “governance and administrative structure duplicate structures that already exist, at lower cost, in the public sector. In addition, costs are higher because AEMERA has chosen private rather than public sector” salaries and benefits.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers had earlier expressed concerns about the need for more integration, analysis and coherence at AEMERA.
Boothe concluded the agency failed because it was based on a false assumption that the public did not trust Alberta’s environmental monitoring because it was done by government. Instead, he said, the public trust was lacking because the monitoring was bad.
Taxation issue Progressive Conservative interim leader Ric McIver accused Phillips of planning to continue collecting a tax of C$50 million for which the industry will get nothing in return, a situation he described as “taxation without representation.”
He also accused Phillips of being a persistent critic of the industry, to which she accused him of character assassination and refused to answer any of his questions or challenges.
The need to take some action on the monitoring front gained urgency in 2014 when a federal government review proved that toxic oil sands chemicals were leaching into the Athabasca River, which runs through the major oil sands region and continues through the Northwest Territories to the Arctic Ocean.
Alberta Auditor General Merwan Saher also weighed in with a report that concluded time was wasted in releasing a report by the Alberta and Canadian governments on the monitoring program.
“The report lacked clarity and key information and contained inaccuracies,” making it hard to determine what tasks the agency had completed, he said, while flagging weak project management.
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