Sander Duncanson
Sep 7, 2018
In a recent interview on BNN Bloomberg, business journalist Amanda Lang spoke with Sander Duncanson, an associate with the Regulatory, Environmental, Aboriginal and Land Group in Osler’s Calgary office, about the industry implications from the pipeline review Bill C-69. This proposed legislation aims to expand and speed up the federal review process for major natural resource projects. In the course of their conversation, they discuss industry reaction to the bill, and Lang specifically asks whether the Trans Mountain decision would have been different had the legislation already been in place.
“We have a big issue in Canada around being competitive globally,” Sander explains. “We are a resource economy and regulatory uncertainty is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. In my view, Bill C-69 is really taking that in the wrong direction. It’s going to significantly increase regulatory uncertainty in this country and it will make projects like Trans Mountain more difficult to move through the process.”
Bill C-69, he continues, is “expanding the scope environmental assessment quite significantly. The overall theme is that it becomes a lot less certain for investors in this country to understand what the process is going to look like, and what we as proponents need to demonstrate to get our projects approved, and what’s the risk at the end of all of that process after we’ve spent millions and millions of dollars that we’re not going to get those approvals at all.”
Watch the full interview “What Bill C-69 means for industry” from September 7, 2018 on BNN Bloomberg.