Over the summer, the Canadian government announced that it’s setting up a Major Projects Office to identify and fast-track projects deemed to be in the national interest. The projects under consideration are spread across Canada and focus on mining, power generation and port expansions.

But each update to the list throws a spotlight on a persistent gap in Canada’s planning processes. The federal government has signalled it wants to see these projects move quickly — but without a clear way to help ensure they proceed without sacrificing the climate resilience, biodiversity or community trust that Canadians also value.

For example, the government has signalled interest in expanding the Port of Churchill, Man., with new shipping, road, rail and energy infrastructure to support expanded Atlantic access for Prairie industries.

These facilities would introduce industrial activity into Arctic and sub-Arctic ecosystems that have seen little prior disturbance and are already stressed by rapid climate change. The siting and design choices will be critical — raising questions about how early ecological risks are being weighed.

What Canada needs alongside its list of major projects is a principled, transparent sequence of steps that governs how those projects are planned and assessed.

Without such a strategy, the focus centres on pushing the project through. And planners and policymakers fail to consider those early, fundamental questions about ecological risk, or whether the location and design make sense in the first place.

Adopting a well-established mitigation hierarchy, as outlined in our recent report, can help Canada avoid the tangled and dysfunctional outcomes we see again and again in current planning and assessment processes.

In this context, mitigation refers to the full set of tools available to deal with environmental impacts, applied in a clear sequence or hierarchy: first avoiding impacts where possible, then minimizing those that remain, then repairing damage on site, and only as a last resort compensating for residual losses elsewhere.

Step 1: Avoid harm with early-stage planning

Too often planners focus only on reducing impacts after basic design decisions are made. This leaves decision-makers boxed into weaker options than if they had first asked what could be avoided — and it can be far costlier as late-stage fixes mean redesigns, deeper ecological damage and heightened conflict.

Effective planning requires backing up and taking in the big picture. What comes into view is a sweep of globally important, largely intact ecosystems — places that anchor our climate, support communities and sustain wildlife and their movements.

That means the first step in any sensible hierarchy is to steer development away from places like sensitive peatlands, areas important for biodiversity, cultural keystone places and headwaters that sustain vital watersheds.

Early-stage planning enables the most important questions to be asked: Is the proposed option the best means of meeting the need, or do lower-cost or less damaging alternatives exist? Are projected ecological, climate and community impacts supported by evidence of commensurate economic and social outcomes?

Answering these questions well depends on strong baseline information about ecosystems and communities — something too often missing at the outset, causing delays while data is gathered.

Governments can begin closing this gap by strengthening the evidence base needed to inform projects before they advance. This includes support for sustained regional ecological monitoring, Indigenous and community knowledge programs and fuller use of strategic and regional impact assessments. All of these measures can identify cumulative effects and landscape-level priorities and provide shared information for planning across entire regions.

Delivering on the Liberal commitment to “map Canada’s carbon and biodiversity-rich ecological landscapes … to enable a more holistic ecosystem approach to conservation, carbon accounting, and project development” would substantially advance and improve early-stage planning. Integrating existing data held by public agencies, private proponents and consultants would further clarify environmental strengths and vulnerabilities.

Step 2: Minimize harm that cannot be avoided

Only after fully considering ways to avoid impacts should the focus shift to minimizing unavoidable damage. This is where design and operational choices matter: adjusting scale, routing, timing and methods to reduce a project’s footprint and its effects.

In ecologically intact regions — places where human pressures have not yet reached levels that compromise core ecological functions — minimization also means confronting growth-inducing impacts head-on by limiting new access, managing roads and corridors and regulating the pace and scale of development to prevent cascading cumulative effects.

Done properly, minimization protects ecological function and reduces long-term environmental, social, and financial liabilities for proponents.

Step 3: Remediate to make impacts temporary

Once all feasible steps for minimization have been taken, it becomes appropriate to move on to onsite remediation — rendering unavoidable impacts temporary through progressive reclamation, revegetation and decommissioning.

Prioritizing remediation in already stressed landscapes reduces cumulative effects, restores ecological function and builds trust by demonstrating recovery during the life of a project, not decades later.

Step 4: Offsetting is the last tool, not the first

The final step in the mitigation hierarchy is offsetting — the idea of restoring or protecting habitat elsewhere to compensate for what is lost to development. In theory, this promises no net loss, or even a net gain.

In reality, it’s the riskiest and least reliable form of mitigation, which is why it must be treated as a last resort. When offsetting is used in isolation, long after a project’s design is locked in, it becomes a poor substitute for the harder, but more valuable, work of avoiding and minimizing impacts at the outset.

As we stress in our report, that kind of sequencing failure matters. Once decisions are made and footprints fixed, ecological losses can no longer be undone, and offsets are expected to carry a burden they cannot realistically bear.

Offsetting should therefore function as a backstop — not a shortcut. Yet, it is frequently looked to as if it were the first tool in the box rather than the last.

A unified federal policy framework

Deploying the mitigation hierarchy is a technically simple approach to project planning, and it can make a substantial difference in getting projects built without unnecessary delays.

It requires a planning mindset open to alternatives and a willingness to invest early in understanding ecosystems and community needs. The hierarchy also aligns with Indigenous perspectives that view natural systems as interconnected, offering pathways for more meaningful engagement.

There is nothing new about this approach. The mitigation hierarchy has guided major-project planning and financing in other countries for decades and appears — albeit inconsistently — across several federal policies. But in this moment of renewed ambition for “nation-building” projects, Canada has an opportunity to bring coherence and discipline to the management of environmental and social impacts.

This is why we are calling for a unified federal policy framework, so that the mitigation hierarchy is applied consistently across federally supported projects. A clear hierarchy — applied early, consistently and transparently — would make decisions stronger, projects more credible and our commitments to biodiversity, climate, and Indigenous rights more than words on paper.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Justina C. Ray, University of Toronto and Dave Poulton, The University of Queensland

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Justina C. Ray is President and Senior Scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada and Adjunct Professor at both University of Toronto and Trent University. Funding sources to WCS Canada can be viewed through annual reports, available at https://www.wcscanada.org/About-Us/Annual-Reports.aspx.

Dave Poulton's work on this project was in part supported by funding from the Policy Dialogue program of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.