Bill C-38 and the Evolution of the National Energy Board: The Changing Role of the National Energy Board from 1959 to 2015
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will explore how the legislative changes and the torqued political debate surrounding the development and transportation of crude oil is changing the role of the National Energy Board (NEB). It will examine how environmental activists strategically targeted the hearing processes of the NEB and how the Federal government responded with Bill C-38, a “legislative fix” to this activity. It will consider how Bill C-38, in turn, led to more demands for public consultation in the process, parallel provincial processes, more litigation and judicial review and a growing lack of public confidence in the integrity of the process and of the NEB itself. Finally, it will explore how all of this may have led to an evolving activist regulator, sensitive to public opinion far and beyond its role as originally conceived. This paper will examine the historical roots of the NEB, its role over the past 56 years and how that has evolved as a result of Bill C-38 amendments and the current political storm. It will examine Bill C-38 and conclude that those changes, in and of themselves, did not fundamentally change how the NEB conducts its business or its independence. Instead, the evolving role of the NEB is more connected to building public trust in its role as a regulator and repairing a public perception of a gutted process than to anything that Bill C-38 itself changed. All of this will be examined through four case studies of oil pipeline projects before the Board before and after the 2012 amendments.
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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 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".