Drawing Lines in the Sand: Parliament's Jurisdiction to Consider Upstream and Downstream Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions in Interprovincial Pipeline Project Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many constitutional questions arise in the context of assessing, approving, and regulating interprovincial pipelines. This paper examines the extent to which upstream and downstream greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be considered and acted upon when proponents seek federal approval to build, expand, or modify an interprovincial pipeline. This question has become relevant in the context of Canada's international commitments under the Paris Agreement, which require rapid, broad, and systemic decarbonisation of the Canadian economy. The article examines the questions through the lens of the regulatory frameworks in force at the time of writing (the National Energy Board Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012) as well as draft legislation under Bill C-69, namely the Canadian Energy Regulator Act and the Impact Assessment Act. Although the new laws do not explicitly refer to indirect emissions, a reasonable interpretation of the legislation suggests that federal regulators would be within the bounds of their statutory authority to include indirect emissions in their deliberations and decision-making. A constitutional analysis suggests that that they would also be justified in doing so. The courts have confirmed federal jurisdiction over regulation of GHG emissions under the criminal law power, and there are two reference cases active at the time of writing that will examine the jurisdictional scope of the peace, order and good government power in the context of carbon pricing. Although it is unchartered jurisprudential territory, it is reasonable to conclude that under the new regulatory regime, Parliament will have the statutory and constitutional authority to consider the full implications of GHG emissions associated with an interprovincial pipeline proposal, especially if the courts continue to interpret jurisdictional powers through the flexible, purposive lens of cooperative federalism.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".