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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".