| Summary: | When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many countries reacted by relaxing environmental rules and Canada was no exception. Environmental regulators across Canada changed rules in unprecedented efforts to balance public health, economic wellbeing and protection of the environment. This briefing paper takes stock of and discusses these actions. We find that Ottawa and all the provinces and territories except Manitoba and the Northwest Territories invoked some changes to environmental rules. Regulators used one of two approaches: enforcement discretion or preemptive rule adjustment. Twenty-four provincial and four federal agencies adjusted 143 environmental rules between them, with the majority being specific to natural resource sectors such as oil, gas, coal, mining, water and fisheries. Industry, government and public stakeholders all benefited from relaxed rules. Alterations included suspension of operating activity requirements (53), extensions to reporting deadlines (21), payment relief (18), extensions to activity deadlines (18), operating licence extensions (16), suspension of government obligations (10) and suspension of reporting requirements (7). Only 41 of the 61 government notices included a specific COVID-related rationale for the rule changes and the explanations lacked detail. Reasons included accommodating regulated entities’ need to observe public health requirements (88), financial relief for industry (38), responding to government capacity constraints (14) and accommodating public observance of health restrictions (3). More than a third of the changes were indefinite, with no set end date. In these cases especially it is critical that government agencies be held accountable for reinstating lost protections in a timely manner. Overall, environmental regulators across Canada responded in similar ways to the pandemic. Some agencies, however, took extraordinary actions. Alberta, for example, was the only jurisdiction to completely suspend reporting requirements and did so across multiple sectors. In ...
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