Janee Auger

After nearly two years of deliberation, the Clean Air Strategic Alliance (CASA) has released its recommendations for the provincial government’s next Clean Air Strategy, which will help formulate a provincially focused policy for air quality control.

The clean air strategy has not been revised since 1991 and there were some drawbacks in the current update. Although the report was part of an extensive public consultation process and in conjunction with non-government organizations, there were some problems coming up with workable solutions, says Myles Kitagawa, a senior associate director with the Toxics Watch Society and an NGO representative on the team.

“I think that we have a consensus on the vision and what we want to see happen in Alberta on clean air,” Kitagawa says. “What there wasn’t time to do was achieve consensus on how we’re going to accomplish these things.”

The report was drafted as part of a multi-stakeholder evaluation that began in September 2007. The project team, which contained approximately 20 members at any given time, was composed of representatives from multiple sectors, including government, industry and non-government organizations and created the recommendation throughout a series of face-to-face meetings.

Nine town hall meetings were held throughout provincial cities and on First Nations reserves, collecting opinions of 122 Albertans. Online and hard-copy surveys were also completed, aggregating another 328 opinions.

The report’s 32 pages deal primarily with the results of these public consultations, and are meant to convey a sense of Albertans’ clean air priorities to the government. The report states that the sample taken was not statistically representative and therefore its results can’t be generalized to Alberta’s population.

Kerry Chomlak, executive director of CASA and a participant in the drafting process, says the report gives a strong indication of what Albertans want from their government legislation, even though it’s largely based on citizen feedback rather than scientific air quality data.

“This is a very good example of how the sectors can collaborate and work together,” she says. “One of the shifts the team identified is a shift from a focus on specific industries towards more area sources like vehicle emissions and agriculture — emissions that are affected by the behaviour of Albertans.”

The report also says that 60 per cent of respondents think air quality in the province is good or excellent and rural Albertans are 15 per cent more likely than urbanites to be satisfied with their air quality.

But while the report is clear about areas it identifies as being of concern to Albertans, it is less certain of its recommendations on dealing with pollution. These suggestions are featured less prominently in an appendix of the report — a result of CASA’s consensus-based process, says Don Bradshaw, director of oil, coal and mineral policy with the Department of Energy and government representative on the project team. (CASA only releases recommendations that have been obtained in consensus with all project team members. Without unanimous support, additional information must be included in the report’s appendix.)

“All the solutions and potential solutions we came up with really do reflect the broad breadth of thinking involved in the process and we thought that if we put them in the appendix, we wouldn’t lose the thinking,” Bradshaw says. “The diversity of the parties involved created a really good examination of what was on the table.”

But the balance between sectors was tough to achieve, according to Kitagawa. “The whole idea of balance between environmental quality and economic interest is something we need to evolve away from,” he says.

And Katigawa has concerns about how the recommendations will actually be implemented. “We found the amount of work, the number of potential actions in a strategy of this scope, means that the ability to do all of the costing of each recommended action was beyond our ability as potential implementers to commit to reliable recommendations.”

Still, he’s hopeful the consensus requirement means the recommendations that are in the report can be carried out more swiftly.

Although government is not obligated to directly follow CASA recommendations, because of the consensus-based process involved in their drafting, they are adopted approximately 75 per cent of the time, according to Chomlak.

The decision regarding which steps to implement in the search for higher air quality now lie with a cross-ministry process that will help integrate the changes over a wider area of governance. By using a cross-ministry process, government officials hope to remedy some of the problems that plagued the 1991 clean air strategy.

“The 1991 Clean Air Strategy was lead by Alberta Environment,” Bradshaw explains. “But what became apparent when updating the strategy was that these issues are cross-cutting.”

By allowing for a cross-ministry process, areas where ministry interests might conflict — such as the trade-offs between environmental protection and industrial development — can be taken into account and balanced before they become issues. “It’s not just one department that will be drafting this strategy,” Bradshaw says. “Government needs to have that same sort of broad spectrum of focus captured in CASA’s recommendation.”