Structural Exclusion of Proximate Communities and Deficiencies in Valued Component and Baseline Development

The Draft Tailored Impact Statement Guidelines (TISG) currently utilize discretionary language in Line 1276, stating that the Proponent “should” work with identified communities and local peoples. This framing is insufficient to ensure methodological consistency, accountability, and meaningful participation under Section 11 of the Impact Assessment Act (2019), particularly for communities in closest proximity to the proposed Revell site.

This submission is submitted by and on behalf of residents in Melgund Township and local peoples residing in the immediate vicinity of the proposed Deep Geological Repository (DGR) site at Revell. As the individuals and communities in closest physical and ecological proximity to the project’s primary footprint, these parties bear the highest degree of environmental, health, and psychosocial risk.

The purpose of this submission is to identify critical deficiencies in the Draft TISG, specifically relating to consultation design, representational structure, and baseline development methodology. The current assessment approach relies on a consultation framework that systematically marginalizes unorganized territories while improperly elevating distant municipal voices as proxies for regional consent.

These structural deficiencies result in a procedurally deficient assessment record that is not sufficient to demonstrate compliance with the meaningful participation requirements of Section 11 of the Impact Assessment Act (2019), and is further inconsistent with established Canadian ethical research standards, including the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS 2), which require appropriate community engagement in research design and baseline development.

Systematic Exclusion and the Failure of Early Engagement

The residents of Melgund Township, encompassing the communities of Borups Corners and Dyment, alongside local peoples including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous seasonal and full-time residents, represent the peoples and communities in closest proximity to the proposed Revell site. 

Despite this immediate physical and social connection to the project area, these parties have been systematically excluded from the foundational stages of the Deep Geological Repository project. Under the Impact Assessment Act (2019), meaningful participation is a mandatory requirement that must begin early in the planning phase to influence project design and site selection. 

Because these residents—the primary neighbours to the site—were systematically sidelined during the site selection process, the Proponent’s baseline characterization designs are fundamentally incomplete. This exclusion ignores the legislative mandate to consider the "lived experience" of those most directly impacted and constitutes a failure to uphold procedural fairness.

Violations of Ethical Research Best Practices and Co-Design

Many of the research methodologies employed by the Proponent fail to meet the standards established by the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2). A core tenet of ethical research is the requirement for community engagement to ensure research is relevant and respectful. By excluding Melgund residents and local peoples—the groups closest to the Revell site—from the co-design of baseline studies, the Proponent has violated the principle of Justice, which requires the fair distribution of research burdens and benefits. 

Furthermore, for Indigenous residents and local peoples, there is no evidence of adherence to the principles of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP®). The current "top-down" model leads to an extraction of local knowledge without community oversight, failing to implement a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) framework where community members serve as co-researchers in defining Valued Components (VCs).

Jurisdictional Displacement and Improper Representation

The current engagement structure improperly elevates the Township of Ignace into a representative role for decisions affecting communities outside its immediate geographic and impact proximity. This results in a structural displacement of the directly affected residents in Melgund Township and surrounding local peoples who live in the closest proximity to the proposed Revell site. While the Township of Ignace has been positioned as a “host” voice within the regional consultation framework, this positioning creates a significant representation gap for the unorganized territories and most impacted local peoples that form the project’s immediate physical footprint.

The manner in which the Township of Ignace has participated in the consultation process extends beyond a municipal framing and is being treated in practice as a proxy for communities outside its geographic and impact boundary. This is procedurally inappropriate insofar as it allows distant municipal-level positions to be interpreted or operationalized as reflecting broader regional consent without any evidentiary basis grounded in direct engagement with the affected communities.

The Township of Ignace has not undertaken any documented direct engagement with residents or local peoples in Dyment, Borups Corners, or other immediately adjacent unorganized territories. There is no record of site-level consultation, community meetings, outreach activities, or structured engagement processes initiated by Ignace within the directly impacted area. This absence of engagement is material and undermines any characterization of Ignace’s positions as representative of those communities and local residents.

Accordingly, reliance on Ignace’s perspectives as a proxy for regional consent is not supported by evidence of direct consultation and results in a procedurally deficient consultation record. It substitutes the views of a geographically distant municipal entity for those of the communities in closest proximity to the proposed Revell site, thereby creating a serious representation gap, distorting the evidentiary basis of the assessment, and undermining the integrity of consultation frameworks.

This mischaracterization of representation establishes a procedurally unsupported consultation framework and must be explicitly corrected within the TISG to ensure that distant municipal positions are not treated as substitutes for, or determinative of, the views of directly affected communities outside municipal boundaries or impact jurisdictions.

Psychosocial Damage and the Impact Pathway of Exclusion

The exclusionary nature of the site selection process has established a clear impact pathway for psychosocial harm. By restricting formal participation to established municipalities, the Proponent has marginalized the residents of unorganized territories and local peoples living closest to the Revell site, resulting in a measurable loss of community agency and heightened stress. This social fracture manifests as community disintegration, reflecting the weakening of the social fabric through the systematic exclusion of voices in closest proximity to the risk.

This constitutes a required assessment component at the TISG stage and must be incorporated as a core Valued Component within baseline co-design, valued component selection, and monitoring framework development. It cannot be deferred to subsequent assessment phases or the Impact Statement stage without undermining the meaningful participation requirements of the Impact Assessment Act. Such deferral would effectively exclude affected communities from defining the parameters by which their own social conditions are measured, thereby compromising procedural integrity and the validity of the assessment framework.

Accordingly, the assessment of these impacts requires the establishment of explicit indicators at the outset of the TISG framework, including community cohesion metrics, trust-in-process indicators, and psychological stress markers. These indicators must be embedded directly into the baseline design to ensure compliance with the federal meaningful participation standard and to prevent retrospective justification of earlier consultation and methodological design choices.

The Proponent must also define a clear methodology for measuring social fracture and social disintegration within the TISG response, incorporating established social determinants of health (SDOH) frameworks where applicable, to ensure these impacts are not merely described qualitatively but are evaluated against a pre-established, co-developed, and transparent baseline supported by clearly defined indicators, thresholds, and assessment methodologies.

Legal Imperative for Mandatory Engagement and Suggested Line-Item Amendments

The Draft TISG currently utilizes discretionary language in Line 1276, stating that the Proponent “should” work with identified local governments and local peoples. This framing is not sufficient to meet the statutory threshold of meaningful participation under Section 11 of the Impact Assessment Act (2019), particularly for those communities in the closest proximity to the proposed Revell site.

In the context of a Tailored Impact Statement Guidelines (TISG) document, language is not neutral—it determines the enforceability of the entire assessment design. Discretionary phrasing such as “should” permits selective engagement, uneven application of consultation standards, and continued reliance on distant municipal proxies in place of directly impacted residents and local peoples.

Accordingly, this submission finds that all discretionary consultation language in proximity-based engagement requirements must be replaced with mandatory language (“must”) to ensure procedural fairness, regulatory consistency, and compliance with the Act.

To correct this deficiency, the following amendments are required:

First, Line 1276 must be amended by replacing “should” with “must,” creating a binding requirement for the Proponent to collaborate directly with the Melgund Local Services Board, the communities of Dyment and Borups Corners and local area peoples in the co-design, co-development and implementation of Section 7 (health, social, and economic conditions) and Section 8.3.2 (community knowledge and lived experience).

Second, Line 158 must be amended to require that the Proponent define the “Local Study Area” on the basis of ecological connectivity and social continuity, explicitly including unorganized territories and communities within the project’s primary watershed and the local peoples living in closest proximity to the proposed site, rather than relying on distant municipal boundaries that do not reflect impact distribution.

Third, Line 261 must require that “Lived Experience” and “Community Knowledge” from residents of unorganized territories, communities such as Dyment and Borups Corners and local peoples be systematically documented and treated as primary baseline data, not supplementary or secondary input, and must be weighted equivalently with municipal submissions.

Finally, Line 685 must include mandatory indicators for assessing “Social Fracture and Community Disintegration” arising from the site selection, consultation, and baseline development processes. These indicators are not ancillary or qualitative add-ons; they are core Valued Component-level determinants of impact that directly reflect procedural integrity, baseline validity, and the credibility of the overall assessment framework. The absence of such indicators at the TISG stage would constitute a material deficiency in the design of the Impact Statement itself.

Accordingly, these indicators must be explicitly defined within the TISG at the outset of the assessment process, including clear co-developed methodology, baseline parameters, and evaluation criteria. They cannot be deferred to subsequent phases, technical studies, or the Environmental Impact Statement stage, as such deferral would permit methodological exclusion of affected communities from defining how impacts to their own social conditions are measured.

Any deferral of indicator definition would also risk retrospective justification of earlier consultation and baseline design failures, thereby undermining the requirements of meaningful participation under Section 11 of the Impact Assessment Act and compromising the integrity of the assessment record.

Analysis of Procedural Breach and Required Remedy

It is submitted that the exclusion of Melgund Township communities, residents and local peoples living closest to the Revell site violates Section 11 of the Impact Assessment Act. 

Under the principles of administrative law, procedural fairness requires that those most affected be given an opportunity to provide input at a meaningful time—specifically before the critical paths of the project are set. Participation is stripped of its statutory purpose when it occurs after foundational decisions, such as site selection, have already been finalized. By foreclosing the opportunity for input on the project's most significant variable, the current process fails the "meaningful participation" mandate, rendering subsequent consultation a procedural nullity rather than a substantive influence.

To remedy this breach, the IAAC must enforce a protocol of retroactive correction. This includes establishing an independent consultation track for Melgund communities and local peoples that is structurally decoupled from the Ignace and Proponent-led processes. 

Furthermore, the Proponent must be required to conduct and fund community-led validation workshops in Melgund and the surrounding area to ensure baseline research plans and data accurately reflects local harvesting, medicinal plant use, food security, formal and informal recreational assets.

Conclusion

This submission finds that the exclusion of the residents and local peoples of Melgund township communities and the immediate area from meaningful and direct engagement during both the site selection and Impact Assessment phases has resulted in a procedurally deficient assessment record. This deficiency is inconsistent with the requirements of Section 11 of the Impact Assessment Act regarding meaningful public participation, and is further inconsistent with established Canadian ethical research standards, including the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS 2), which require appropriate community engagement in research design and baseline development.

Meaningful participation requires that communities and local peoples living in closest proximity to the proposed Revell site are afforded a substantive opportunity to influence the co-design, scope, and evaluative structure of the assessment, including the definition of Valued Components and baseline methodologies. The exclusion of these communities and local peoples from these foundational stages undermines both procedural fairness and the evidentiary sufficiency of the assessment framework.

The Draft TISG must be revised to rectify the exclusion of Melgund Township residents and local peoples in closest proximity to the proposed Revell site, and to ensure that the Impact Statement is grounded in data that is ethically and collaboratively sourced from those most directly affected. Proximity-based lived experience must be explicitly integrated into the identification of Valued Components and must inform the co-design of baseline methodologies and monitoring frameworks, rather than being treated as supplementary input.