Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 01/02) - The Northern regulator responsible for weighing the costs of development is attempting to find a remedy to a case of chronic under-funding.

By its estimate, the workload of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board has risen 100 per cent each of the last three years. During the same period, the board's core funding has remained virtually unchanged, at between $1 million and $1.1 million per year.

"We think we're doing a fairly good job of biophysical assessment, but we need to increase our ability to address cumulative effects, cultural impacts and we need to have additional capacity to address socio-economic impacts," said the board's executive director Vern Christensen.

Responsible for conducting environmental assessments, the board relies on the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development's claims implementation division for funding.

The board is currently engaged in a strategic planning session partly aimed at developing a funding request for the coming fiscal year. The request will be submitted to DIAND by the end of February, Christensen said.

"I don't want to portray this in any way as an adversarial process," he said. "It's a collaborative process. Everybody's learning what it means to implement this act."

One of the main lessons so far is that the board requires far more than the $522,000 provided for it annually under the implementation plan developed for the Sahtu and Gwich'in land claims. Negotiation of the claims gave birth to the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, which transferred some responsibilities from the federal regulators to northern boards such as the MVEIRB.

"Certain assumptions were made in the implementation plan, and some of those assumptions turned out not to be true," said Aideen Nabigon, DIAND director of implementation management.

"It was a much different world when those land claims were being negotiated," said Nabigon.

Recognizing the increased workload, DIAND doubled the board's budget -- to $1 million annually -- when the board took over from the working group that preceded it.

"We know they're pretty thin on the ground," said NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mines president Mike Vaydik. He said the chamber urged Ottawa to ensure the new boards got the resources needed to carry out their responsibilities in a timely manner.

"We were just looking at the diamond stuff then," Vaydik said. "We had no idea oil and gas stuff was coming."

The federal Treasury Board must be approached for funding when requests are significantly above the $522,000 set out in the implementation plan, said Nabigon.

A separate funding request will be made for the board's role in assessing the two pipeline proposals before it, Christensen said.