Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, 2019: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Sustainability, and Environmental Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is well documented that the colonizers of Canada have long coveted the ancestral homelands of the Canadian Indigenous peoples for settlement and development. With this end goal in mind, it is not surprising that there exists an extensive history of assimilative efforts by the colonizers with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Canada—for example, legal assimilation through enfranchisement (voluntary and involuntary) and blood quantum requirements, and cultural assimilation through residential schools and the “sixties scoop”. Another form of assimilation is environmental assimilation, that is, colonial development on Indigenous homelands to the extent whereby Indigenous cultural activities can no longer be supported in the development-transformed environment. Herein, I examine Bill C-69, a Government of Canada omnibus bill, through an environmental justice lens in the context of development across Canada on Indigenous homelands and impacts on Indigenous cultural sustainability. Specifically, Part 1 (i.e., the Impact Assessment Act, 2019) and Part 3 (i.e., the Canadian Navigable Waters Act, 2019) of Bill C-69 pose significant threats to Indigenous cultural sustainability. Through an environmental justice lens, procedural aspects include the use of the project list and scheduled waterways, the discretionary decision-making powers of the Government of Canada representatives, and the lack of acknowledgement of procedural elements of the environmental assessment processes that are constitutionally protected in comprehensive land claims. While, distributive justice aspects consist of unsustainable development from an Indigenous perspective, whereby environmental costs and benefits have been (and will be) distributed inequitably. Bill C-69 is a flawed statute that reinforces the colonial policy of assimilation.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".