Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 28 August 2019, both the Impact Assessment Act (IAA) and the Canadian Energy Regulator Act (CERA) came into force, and Canada’s environmental assessment process and its regulatory regime for major energy projects were fundamentally changed. With this new legislation in place, is it fair to say that no new pipelines will be approved in Canada? The answer is likely yes but not solely or even largely as a result of this legislation. Changes in global oil markets have led to significant reductions in forecast production from Alberta’s oil sands. This implies that, with no new pipelines permitted, and assuming those with permits in hand are built, the network will be sufficient to cover forecast oil export demand well into the 2030s. As such, there is a tautological answer to whether new pipelines will be approved in Canada: they likely will not be, unless market conditions change substantially, because new pipelines beyond those currently approved will not be needed. Tautologies notwithstanding, Canada’s new regulatory regime represents a significant departure from previous legislation. This article asks whether it is likely that a new pipeline project could achieve approval under the combined process implemented in the CERA and the IAA. The answer is complicated but likely turns on two issues already prevalent in Canada’s pipeline debates. The first issue facing any new pipeline review would be the ability to reconcile such development with Canada’s responsibilities to Indigenous peoples. The second is the collision between Canada’s climate change commitments, cumulative local environmental effects, and new oil sands production enabled by new pipelines. While approval has been — and will continue to be — a political decision, the analysis presented herein shows that the combined consideration of cumulative environmental effects, greenhouse gas emissions, and the link between pipelines and oil sands growth is likely to make it more difficult to approve a pipeline. This is because, when combined with recent changes to judicial review doctrine in Canada, the new regime will make it much more difficult for regulators and political decision-makers to justify such approvals.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.052 | 0.015 |
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".