19 Oct More on that Sydney Harbor silt plume

The Cape Breton Post’s Chris Shannon has a thorough and detailed account of Environment Canada’s failure to monitor or control rampant siltation from the Sydney Harbor dredging boondoggle project (first reported here).

In among the buck-passing and not-my-department quotes lies this gem:

The federal environmental screening assessment report is supposed to be posted online. But a check of each of the departments’ websites didn’t turn up the report.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency said the screening report couldn’t be found on its agency’s website either since it doesn’t conduct that type of environmental assessment.

“It’s really the responsible authorities that are responsible for the mitigation measures, the follow-up programs, and that would all be detailed in the screening report,” Lucille Jamault said.

Did Ms. Jamault really say the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency has no responsibility to provide access to environmental assessments? Did she say it with a straight face?

The real problem here is the politicization of Environment Canada. Projects should not be subject to varying standards of environmental assessment, monitoring, and control simply because they are popular or politically useful to the government in power.