Gibson comments on draft NS/NL Offshore Wind RA docs + appendix

Please see the attached submission.

The summary is as follows:

The Draft Terms of Reference and Draft Agreements would benefit from extensive revisions to address many openings for improvement.  Perhaps most important are revisions to the Terms of Reference document to align the weak and incomplete expectations for the assessment work with the considerably more suitable expectations for the contents of the committee report. Key areas of deficiency in the earlier portions include

• inconsistent versions of cumulative effects that often do not include the reasonable range of regional contributing factors and neglect interactive effects,
• weak and incomplete guidance on social, economic and health matters, including inattention to distributional effects and economic viability; and
• frequent neglect of needs and options for regional-scale responses to identified cumulative problems or opportunities.

Improvements needed throughout the documents include revisions

• to recognize Indigenous authority and Indigenous rights to processes that support free, prior and informed consent;
• to identify knowledge gaps and the implications of these gaps for regional and project level initiatives (including emphasis on precautionary approaches in light of uncertainties);
• to include attention to climate change effects in cumulative effects analyses; and
• to enable the assessment to develop a reasonable working understanding of regional cumulative effects opportunities and perils, describe plausible desirable and undesirable future scenarios, identify options for regional scale responses (e.g., plans, areas of exclusion, means of expanding distribution of benefits, ...) and select among these options to make suitable recommendations for regional actions and for guiding project-level deliberations and decisions.

The final point above is clearly the most important, most demanding, and most central to what effective regional assessment should deliver.

The Terms of Reference document seems to reflect the beginnings of a transition from the old focus on project-level mitigation of significant adverse environmental effects to the current (since 2019) sustainability-centred Act, which enables regional assessments that can identify regional needs and responses that promise positive contributions to lasting economic, social, environmental and health gains.

The Agreements are also limited, but seem to be drafted loosely enough to permit revisions to the Term of Reference that would begin to meet the purposes, mandate and principles of the current law.