Land cleanup rules cover 20,000 pages

May 31 2018

Cleaning up contaminated land before new homes can be built is expensive and complicated as government regulations continue to change.
We asked a British Columbia-based environmental consultant about the regulatory burden. It turns out regulations now cover 20,000 pages in at least a score of bound volumes.
Harm Gross, president of Next Environmental of Burnaby, said B.C. upgraded its Contaminated Site Regulation last year and other provinces are also adding new rules.
“Regulations have seen substantial updates across Canada in recent years,” Gross said.
Saskatchewan’s updated Environmental Management and Protection Act thoroughly overhauled the old act by introducing a new impacted sites registry and by providing the regulator with more power to order persons responsible to conduct site assessments.
New guidelines were also introduced in Alberta, where the regulator released a new Environmental Site Assessment Standard in March 2016.
Manitoba enacted amendments to the province’s Contaminated Sites Remediation Regulation in April 2014.
Gross said that with regulations in flux and frequent changes in rules, the potential for lowering and accurately predicting costs for site remediation projects is challenging.