THE PILLARS OF STAGNATION.

Legislation creating the Canadian infrastructure bank, now on the Trudeau Liberal omnibus railroading machine in Ottawa, got a brief sham hearing in Parliament Tuesday. But there is good news. Under the law, the CEO and chairperson of the bank cannot be appointed if the individual “is less than 18 years of age.”

That the CEO will be able to smoke pot and sign cheques at the same time is about the only comforting sub-clause in the Canada Infrastructure Bank Act. Once portrayed as an independent public-private institution that would fill Canada’s famed “infrastructure gap,” of somewhere between a zillion and a bazillion dollars, the legislation actually installs the minister of finance and the federal cabinet as de facto controllers of infrastructure development funding across Canada.

Under the act, every road, bridge and energy project branded as big-time infrastructure that needs federal funding could find itself in the clutches of the new fake bank and meddling federal politicians picking pet projects. Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi has already laid claim to funding high-speed trains in Southern Ontario and between Calgary and Edmonton.

Not that it matters. If the latest proposals for revamping Canada’s environmental and energy agencies make their way into law, not much infrastructure is likely to be needed across Canada. New reports from two different Liberal-appointed federal “expert panels” promise to bog down Canadian economic development in endless regulatory wrangling for decades to come.

The newest report — Forward, Together: Enabling Canada’s Clean, Safe, and Secure Energy Future — is from the Expert Panel on the Modernization of the National Energy Board. If follows another report last month — Building Common Ground: A New Vision for Impact Assessment in Canada — from the Expert Panel for the Review of Environmental Assessment Processes.

If the above titles seem strangely redundant, that’s because both reports come from the same cabal of intellectual-thought leadership. The “experts” on the panels are all products of the green sustainability enviroculture that now dominates federal policy-making within the Justin Trudeau/Gerald Butts governance machinery.

A compilation of the biographies of the nine experts on the two panels goes something like this: a former commissioner of sustainable development, a former corporate vice-president of sustainability, an advocate for the precautionary principle and green energy, an aboriginal legal rights lawyer, a corporate environmental stakeholders’ advocate for sustainable development, a First Nations person who served as a Liberal MP, the head of a government-funded science think tank, a First Nations chief from British Columbia, and a sustainability and strategic-development specialist with wide experience in such matters.

Hard to imagine these experts disagreeing on anything, which explains why both reports — written separately — reach the same conclusions after using the same techniques to gather information. They staged hearings/surveys/consultations across the country, likely with many of the same participants, before offering up identical basic recommendations: increase regulation, appoint new agencies with vast new powers to replace existing ones and — above all — mandate the incorporation of “Indigenous knowledge” into all decision-making.

The new NEB reform report, released Monday, claims that “Canadians told us” they want to trash the old energy board and set up a new Canadian Energy Information Agency and a new Canadian Energy Transmission Commission. All new energy projects would be subject first to a one-year federal cabinet review “before” detailed project reviews. That stage would then be followed by a two-year commission review in collaboration with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA).

Apparently nobody told the experts on the NEB panel that the experts on the other panel recommended that the CEAA should be trashed and replaced with a new federal authority, known as the Impact Assessment Commission, with powers similar to the CRTC and — as with the CRTC — subject to appeal to cabinet.

We should note that the new environmental assessment commission is no longer just about the environment. As the experts on the panel put it, “in our view assessment processes must move beyond the bio-physical environment to encompass all impacts likely to result from a project, both positive and negative.”

Now, “all impacts” is a lot of impacts to assess, especially when — as recommended by the experts — all decisions should be “based on the five pillars of sustainability (environment, economy, social, cultural and health).” When it comes to energy projects, that could mean trying to imagine what the impact of a new pipeline or nuclear fusion or mining project might be on everything from the production of cat videos to the future of everything on the planet.

Another warning: Any hope that these expert recommendations for the NEB and the CEAA might be tempered by real science must be put aside. Both panels explicitly and adamantly insist that “western science” must be dethroned and placed on a parallel with aboriginal knowledge. The NEB experts said “Canadians told us” that they want “to place Indigenous knowledge on an equal footing with Western Science.”

The experts on the CEAA panel reached the same conclusion. They called for “equal recognition of traditional knowledge” at hearings of the new Impact Assessment Commission. There is a “disconnect between western science and indigenous knowledge” that must be bridged by giving both western science and indigenous knowledge “equal weight in decisionmaking.”

In light of current concerns about cultural appropriation, this might be an area where it would be best to avoid a rush to adopt indigenous knowledge. The state of western science is already something of a shambles, in fact and in the public mind.

And so here we are: An infrastructure bank and two expert panels, three potential pillars of economic stagnation calling for massive government control and regulation in the name of the five pillars of sustainable development.