EDMONTON - The Pembina Institute is pulling its support from an eight-year-old oilsands management association it has deemed ineffective and in need of a complete overhaul.
Chris Severson-Baker, policy director for the environmental think-tank, said Sunday that on more than one occasion his organization's involvement with the Cumulative Environmental Management Association has simply been "more effort than it's worth."
"The government has squandered an opportunity to deal with cumulative impacts that were understood eight to ten years ago," Severson-Baker said.
The management association is a collection of around 50 government, industry, environmental, and Aboriginal organizations that were created to come up with a plan for balancing industrial growth and protecting the ecosystem around the oilsands hub of Fort McMurray.
Severson-Baker, who also served on the association's board, said the government has been putting far too much time and resources approving new oilsands projects, to the point where there's often no government staff available to attend the association's meetings.
He said this led to the management association missing a number of key deadlines in which it had planned to have developed limits and protective frameworks for oilsands expansion.
"The message that was coming from the Alberta cabinet in particular was rapid development," he said.
Glen Semenchuk, the association's executive director, said it was untrue that government representatives weren't showing up to meetings.
Rather, he said the problem was that the government representatives didn't have the authority to approve decisions, and that decisions had to be delayed while they consulted with their bosses. He noted that the same delays occurred with the association's other member organizations.
"It's no secret that (the association) had some problems, but there's been a fair bit done in the last few months to improve on those problems," Semenchuk said, noting that Pembina Institute members had themselves been absent from meetings.
"I'm just disappointed that Pembina would leave instead of helping from the inside."
The Toxics Watch Society of Alberta and the Fort McMurray Environmental Association have also announced they will withdraw from the association.
In a new report to be released Monday, the Pembina Institute recommends the management association be dismantled and created again from scratch and organized so that the interests of all parties involved are heard and noted.
It also outlines a process in which it feels a better development strategy could be created, beginning with the suspension of new oilsands project approvals.
A spokesman with Alberta Environment said Sunday that the province didn't want to comment on a report it hadn't seen yet, and would wait until it is released before responding to Pembina's claims about problems with association.
The Pembina report says that after the suspension of new oilsands projects, the next step would be setting some science-based environmental limits to development. Based on those limits, the report recommends the governments of Alberta, Canada, and First Nations should create new regional environmental management systems and monitoring systems to implement them.
The report then recommends the drafting of a final environmental management plan for implementation by the government.
"A lot of work has been done to explore different options and gather scientific input," Severson-Baker said. "There's really nothing stopping the government from doing that."
Severson-Baker said the current make-up of the association is dominated and largely funded by industry. The report says two First Nations, the Athabasca Cree and the Mikisew Cree, who are downstream from oilsands production, recently left the group citing concerns about the interests of its industry representatives and perceived power inequalities among group members.
The report highlights a number of areas where the Institute feels the current management association has failed, including the creation of a plan to protect wildlife and regional eco-systems, standards for oilsands reclamation, and limits on water withdrawals from the Athabasca River.
Severeson-Baker said creating a new management association is an opportunity for the government to address mounting national and international concern about the overall impact of Alberta's oilsands.
"I really don't see how they can change their image, the image that's being created in the rest of the world of the oilsands being a very dirty resource and the Alberta government in particular being unwilling to impose strict environmental regulations, unless they take that approach."
