Reductions in federal oversight of aquatic systems in Canada: implications of the new Navigation Protection Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The reduction of environmental legislation and regulation has become a common practice for governments looking to reduce government overhead while boosting private sector investment. Following this trend, in 2012 Canada enacted major legislative changes to its environmental policies. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA) was overhauled, and related Acts, including the (federal) Navigable Waters Protection Act (NWPA), saw their regulatory processes reduced. There is a need for aquatic scientists to better understand the potential implications for environmental protection and the systems we study. We provide an overview of changes to the CEAA and NWPA before quantifying the duration and outcomes of NWPA-triggered assessments, as well as the implications of changes to the CEAA and NWPA. We find that 87% of environmental assessments that were triggered by the NWPA in the last 10 years were completed within 2 years and that the majority resulted in project approval. Of the assessments reviewed, 58% were on water bodies that are no longer protected under the new Navigation Protection Act, suggesting that the combination of these changes and new Acts will result in substantial reductions of environmental assessments on aquatic systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".