Environmental Assessment, Overlap, Duplication, Harmonization, Equivalency, and Substitution: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and a Path Forward
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A cornerstone of sustainable development is environmental assessment. Through environmental assessment processes regulators identify and assess the environmental, social, and economic consequences of proposed projects to assist them in determining whether projects should be approved, and if so, under what conditions. Despite the benefits of environmental assessment (EA), the federal government has undertaken a course of action that is diminishing federal EA in Canada under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The federal government claims that there is unnecessary overlap and duplication between federal and provincial EA processes. This article deconstructs the premise that there is such unnecessary overlap and duplication and that federal EA should therefore be diminished. The article concludes that where improvements relating to joint federal and provincial or territorial assessment are needed, they should be made through increased but appropriate harmonization, and better cooperation, coordination, and convergence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.048 | 0.074 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.107 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".