Review board decries lack of participant funding for Nunavut groups

This INAC map shows the marine areas covered by the federal government’s strategic environmental assessment, or SEA, that’s now being done in preparation for potential oil and gas exploration in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. (INAC IMAGE)

The Nunavut Impact Review Board said it cannot offer the funding Clyde River’s Hunters and Trappers Organization has requested to help them participate in an environmental assessment related to offshore resource development.

The HTO approached the NIRB earlier this month for support to take part in the federal government’s strategic environmental assessment, or SEA, of potential offshore oil and gas development east of Baffin Island.

In an Aug. 4 letter to the NIRB, the HTO chair, Jerry Natanine, noted the level of concern over oil and gas exploration among community members and the desire to “meaningfully participate” in any consultation.

The letter also pointed to the federal government’s obligation to facilitate “deep consultation” with Indigenous peoples, as set out by a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling.

The July decision overturned a National Energy Board-issued permit to allow seismic testing in Davis Strait and Baffin Bay.

The NIRB used its Aug. 10 letter to acknowledge the funding gap that exists in Nunavut’s assessment process.

“While the Board supports your request and recognizes the critical importance of the participation of the local Hunters and Trappers Organizations and communities throughout this area during the Board’s Strategic Environmental Assessment, I regret to advise you that there is currently no formal participant funding program in Nunavut to provide this kind of support,” NIRB chair Elizabeth Copland responded in an Aug. 10 letter.

Copland said the NIRB is “very receptive” to working with the HTO and other community groups who wish to take part.

But over the years, she said the review board has repeatedly flagged the lack of formal participant funding available to groups in Nunavut.

Most requests for funding are dealt with be the federal government on a project-to-project basis, but the NIRB said this results in inconsistencies between Nunavut and most other Canadian jurisdictions, where assessments are carried out through bodies like the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission or the National Energy Board—each of which has its own participant funding program.

And that funding is crucial to help access the resources and expertise needed to navigate the assessment process, the NIRB said, including legal counsel and support from consultants.

The NIRB said the funding support it’s prepared to offer is more like a “community engagement” program, which offers very limited logistical support, such as travel and accommodation for groups to be present at public hearings away from their home communities.

“Given the very different purposes, focus and processes associated with participant funding, when compared to the NIRB’s community engagement funding, the NIRB asserts that community engagement funding is in no way a substitute for participant funding,” Copland wrote in the Aug. 10 letter, copied to Indigenous and Northern Affairs minister Carolyn Bennett.

“This limited support is not designed to provide the resources necessary to ensure fulsome participation of potentially affected groups.”

After a false start in 2013, the strategic environmental assessment, or SEA, for Davis Strait and Baffin Bay got going in earnest this past February, when Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada announced the NIRB would lead it.

That study, to be completed by March 2019, is expected to help the federal government decide whether to invite companies to bid on permits for offshore oil and gas exploration in the waters off eastern Baffin Island.

Ten of the Qikiqtani region’s 13 communities—Resolute Bay, Grise Fiord, Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River, Qikiqtarjuaq, Pangnirtung, Iqaluit, Kimmirut, and Cape Dorset—lie within or close to the area covered by the SEA.

The NIRB hosted public meetings in all of those communities this past spring.

This fall, the NIRB will follow up on that first round of community meetings with work on the scope of the SEA, the project’s first phase.

NIRB Letter to Clyde River HTO Re: Participant Funding by NunatsiaqNews on Scribd