Last month, with little protest or fanfare, the government of British Columbia passed Bill 51, its new Environmental Assessment Act.
The new legislation recognizes that resource-development projects can have different benefits and costs for different people. In particular, it requires future reviews to consider gender as a factor in how some people might experience greater benefits or harms than others. As an Indigenous woman who has grown up in a resource community, worked much of my life in the industry, and whose family has benefited from resource-sector jobs, I welcome this important new direction. To me, this change is just common sense.
That’s why I can’t understand why a similar provision in proposed federal legislation has been the cause of so much heated debate.
Two years ago, I worked with Amnesty International on a major research report looking at how decades of intensive resource development in northeast B.C. have had different impacts on women than on men in my community of Fort St. John. The report looked at how booms in resource development are accompanied by sharp increases in local prices for housing, food and other necessities.
For women who face concrete barriers to finding high-paying jobs in the resource sector — including access to childcare, discrimination in hiring, and workplace harassment and violence — rising costs are a real problem. They might find it harder to make ends meet or become much more dependent on the men in their lives.
Housing and food insecurity are known factors potentially contributing to the likelihood that a woman will experience violence. This, combined with high drug and alcohol consumption rates among resource-sector workers when they “blow off steam” in the host community, leads to a higher risk that women will experience violence.
This isn’t to say that all men who work in the industry are complicit in harassment and violence against women — that simply isn’t the case. I love many people who work in the resource sector, including my husband, as well as countless family members and friends, but I have also experienced violence committed by resource-sector workers who targeted me because I’m an Indigenous woman.
None of these findings are new. Numerous government and academic studies have pointed them out before. More importantly, these are the kinds of impacts that anyone who has lived their whole life in a resource town can tell you about.
This is why I’m perplexed that this month in Ottawa, Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, was moved to committee for further study amidst great fanfare and considerable protest from some provincial and federal politicians, and industry groups.
The word gender appears precisely once in B.C.’s proposed legislation, and only once in the proposed federal legislation, but its inclusion is ground-breaking. B.C. calls for all assessments to consider the “disproportionate effects on distinct human populations, including populations identified by gender.” The government of Canada calls for assessments to consider “the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors.”
This one little word could make a huge difference in the lives of women like me who live in host communities, and it’s part of an overall shift in understanding what factors should be considered when projects are approved and under what conditions. Under the new B.C. legislation and the proposed new federal legislation, when projects are reviewed, those reviews will look not only at the impacts on the physical environment, but also on socioeconomic impacts, including how different groups of people might be affected by resource development projects in different ways. This is critical to protecting the human rights of all people, as well as promoting prosperity for all people living in host communities.
Resource development projects are often embraced by communities because they have created opportunities and material wealth for some families, including my own, but wealth and prosperity cannot be measured only in dollars. Health and wellness are also important measures by which to gauge the prosperity of a community, and healthy communities are those where women aren’t targeted for violence.
Detractors in Ottawa claim that factoring gender into the assessment process will slow it down, create uncertainty and therefore kill industry. I couldn’t disagree more.
By integrating gender-based analysis into the proposed revisions to the assessment process for resource development projects, the provincial and federal governments are promoting a better model of project planning, which will recognize and mitigate potential harmful impacts, such as violence against women, and promote true prosperity for communities.
Connie Greyeyes of Fort St. John is a community advocate, dedicated mother and wife of a resource-sector worker.
