Building bridges of trust to energy decision-making

Canada’s energy scene desperately needs a pracademy: a place where theory meets practice; where dialogue is robust and respectful; where ideas become reality and find purpose in everyday life.

It’s a place where practitioners and academics put their heads together in a powerful ‘four-D’ combination of idea development, discussion, decisions and deployment.

So what would an energy pracademy’s praxis – where theory and learning get turned into practical application – look like in Canada? Particularly as we wrestle with the interplay between ethics, economics and politics?

Dr. Monica Gattinger is the chair of the University of Ottawa’s Positive Energy project. Better decision making is Positive Energy’s raison d’etre. And it may well be what pulls Canada’s energy future back from the abyss.

The pracademy will play a critical role in shaping how energy issues get defined, solutions proffered and plans rolled out – all based on better decision making. Positive Energy uses the “convening power of the university” to bring together the right people, in the right place, at the right time, for the right reasons.

Since its birth in 2015, Positive Energy has achieved some remarkable results.

In her responses to the questions below, Gattinger reflects on what we need to do to get Canada’s energy act together.

What was the original catalyst for you thinking about the need for an initiative like Positive Energy? Was it specific incident?

There wasn’t a specific incident per se but rather, a growing recognition that social opposition to energy projects of all sorts – pipelines, windmills, electricity transmission lines, etc. – was ever on the rise. I’ve been studying energy policy and regulation for 20-plus years, and never had I seen it so fractious and polarized. It became clear to me that there was a need for an initiative to figure out (a) why this was happening and, (b) more importantly, what to do about it.

What mattered just as much as the research program was the approach to ongoing engagement of energy leaders. The ‘process’ – convening senior leaders to develop a collective understanding of the problem and a shared ownership for solving it on an ongoing basis – was just as important as the ‘product’ (policy briefs, studies, recommendations, etc.). Without ongoing engagement and buy-in of energy leaders, the research would be for naught. We have been very fortunate to get tremendous traction with senior leaders from government, industry, Indigenous communities, the ENGO community and academia. It has been a very rewarding project.

If you had to identify three major impediments to decision-making in relation to energy projects, would any particular things stand out consistently from project to project?

Just three? Kidding aside, the main message that’s come forward from our research and engagement is that multiple factors underpin the public confidence challenge when it comes to individual projects. Our research points to three key issues.

First, Canada needs a long-term energy vision for the country and how competing priorities will be balanced and bridged. A greater consensus has emerged in Canadian society about the need to address climate change and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, but polarized debates have stymied evidence-based discussion of Canada’s future energy mix, energy systems and ability to supply energy products to the world. This is particularly the case when it comes to the country’s oil and gas resources. In the absence of greater clarity on Canada’s long-term energy future, many energy projects (not just oil and gas) will continue to be opposed on broader questions of public policy in the regulatory realm. This will intensify public frustration and increase regulatory risk for investors.

Second, energy development in the 21st century must balance and bridge local and higher-order energy interests and concerns. Local communities and Indigenous communities want a say in their energy futures, along with meaningful decision-making roles and participation (including revenues) in energy projects. That said, they require resources and time to develop the capacity and mechanisms to do so. Policy-makers and regulators must seek innovative ways of balancing and bridging local and higher-order interests to ensure broader market/environmental/social interests are served. This is especially important for linear projects (pipelines, power transmission) and is pivotal to retaining the competitiveness of the Canadian economy and the country’s competitiveness as an investment destination. In addition, Canada needs to build and strengthen long-term planning mechanisms to address cumulative environmental, economic and social effects of multiple projects. This will provide greater certainty and clarity for all involved, but must be done in a way that seriously considers the impacts on the country’s investment climate and competitiveness of its energy industry for the broader economy.

Third, Canada’s energy decision-making system is not broken but needs to be modernized through ‘informed reform’ that takes the long view. Polarized debates have challenged long-term evidence-based analysis and recommendations. The decision-making system needs to be approached as a system with policy, planning and regulatory parts that need to be better aligned. Unfortunately, Canada is increasingly viewed as a relatively high political/regulatory risk jurisdiction for energy investments – and some recommended reforms could worsen the situation, not only for energy investors, but for the pursuit of environmental and social imperatives as well. The consequences of poor reforms will affect all energy sources, including renewable energy and the country’s capacity to move to a lower carbon energy future. Finally, it is crucial to better distinguish between decisions that should rest in the hands of policy-makers (values-based decisions involving broad tradeoffs) versus those that are the preserve of independent regulators (project-based decisions aligning with overarching policy).

We realize this is a tall order and goes well beyond individual project decision-making processes, but that is precisely the point: Positive Energy’s research has underscored time and again that one of the main reasons Canada faces public confidence challenges over individual projects is that the country has not adequately attended to the broader policy, economic, environmental and social context of energy decision-making.

Why is the university environment a better convening place? How much does the idea of trust figure into this dynamic?

Given how polarized energy policy, politics and projects have become, a university is the ideal place to convene various interests – government, industry, Indigenous, ENGO. Universities provide a neutral, nonpartisan evidence-based forum. And as a bilingual university in the nation’s capital, the University of Ottawa is ideally positioned to provide a positive, pan-Canadian forum for evidence-based discussion and collective resolution of shared public confidence challenges.

As for trust: trust – or, more accurately, a lack of trust between key energy interests – figured centrally in our thinking. People needed a neutral, positive, solution-focused forum to grapple with the issues in a productive – not polarizing – way. We have worked very carefully to ensure we bring the right leaders to the right place asking the right questions at the right time. That has helped to build bridges of trust – not barriers of mistrust – between people and organizations with different views, interests and concerns.

What’s in store for 2018 on the Positive Energy front? What do you see as the major issues?

2018 will be a very exciting year for Positive Energy. The first three years of the initiative focused on Public Confidence in Energy Decision-Making draw to a close in the first half of 2018. Our final conference for this first phase of Positive Energy will take place on April 23-24 in Ottawa (mark your calendars!). We will be bringing together energy leaders – many of whom participated in the inaugural Positive Energy conference in March 2015 – to highlight the full suite of research recommendations from the first three years of Positive Energy and to celebrate how far we have come.

In 2018, we will launch Trust in Transition, Positive Energy’s next three-year project. Our research and engagement to date has underscored the need for a neutral nonpartisan forum when it comes to public trust in energy transition decision-making. A greater consensus has emerged in Canada about the need to act on climate change. Going forward, public trust and support for energy transition will be pivotal to the country’s capacity to move to a low-carbon energy future.

Positive Energy’s Trust in Transition project will provide a neutral forum and solution-focused research to help build and maintain public confidence in transition. The questions we will tackle are not easy – but they’re pivotal:

• What is the role of the oil, gas and nuclear sectors in Canada’s energy system now and into the future?
• How can Canada foster social acceptance of energy technologies that can disrupt markets, energy services and communities?
• How can the country build and co-ordinate an expanded role for Indigenous governments and municipal authorities in transition?
• How might techno-economic and other futures models that inform decision-making better integrate public confidence into their projections?

We are well into planning for this next phase of Positive Energy and look forward to building new partnerships and expanding our network in the months and years ahead. To that end, I invite any of your readers to connect with us if they’d like to join us.

(In part three: ReGenerate Alberta, a new social enterprise asking critical questions about better asset – people and things – management for a secure and sustainable energy future.)

Bill Whitelaw is president and CEO at JuneWarren-Nickle’s Energy Group.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.