2026 OAIA Conference

Beyond Assessment: Shaping the Future of Assessment Through Innovation & Lifecycle Thinking

November 3rd & 4th at the Ontario Bar Association, Toronto

Full Schedule

"ask questions, challenge assumptions, make connections, and take these conversations back to your organizations and communities"

We are meeting at a pivotal moment. As governments seek to accelerate major projects, streamline approvals, and reduce duplication, our profession must continue to uphold environmental responsibilities, support meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities, and maintain public trust through transparent, evidence-based decision-making.

Our theme, Beyond Assessment: Shaping the Future of Assessment Through Innovation & Lifecycle Thinking, reflects the role impact assessment plays throughout a project’s lifecycle. Over the next two days, we will explore how early decisions shape projects, how impact assessment is evolving, and how commitments drive meaningful results from design through construction and operations.

Moving beyond assessment ...

This year’s theme highlights the importance of life-cycle thinking in impact assessment, recognizing environmental/impact assessment as a dynamic process that guides design choices, risk management and implementation strategies, rather than a standalone regulatory milestone.

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A message from OAIA President, Blair Shoniker

For more than 30 years, the Ontario Association for Impact Assessment has brought together practitioners, researchers, Indigenous Knowledge holders, regulators, proponents, academics, and public- and private-sector professionals...

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Thank You

Sponsors

November 3rd & 4th, 2026

Scheduled

Sessions

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  • Day 1


  • Day 2


  • Elder traditional opening and land acknowledgement discussion.

    Moderator: Blair Shoniker, GHD
    Opening & Closing
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • This panel will explore the place of impact assessment within the project lifecycle. It will explore the various stages from identification of project needs to project delivery by considering design choices, risk management, and implementation strategies. The panelists will consider the optimization of assessment in the context of the lifecycle.

    Session Facilitator: Anjala Puvananathan, Impact Assessment Agency of Canada
    Opening & Closing
    Panel Discussion
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • Critical project decisions are often made before formal environmental assessments begin. This session will introduce Land Relationship Visioning, a First Nations-informed planning approach that allows stakeholders to explore project relationships with the land and local communities before key decisions become fixed.

    Drawing on CIPS' experience, the session will provide a structured method combining First Nations perspectives, place-based knowledge, and dialogue to identify significant values, risks, and desired outcomes early in the lifecycle. Participants will examine common pitfalls, such as beginning with predetermined solutions or engaging communities too late.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 1
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • Major infrastructure projects are often shaped long before formal assessments begin. This presentation explores how early relationship-building, collaborative problem-solving, and informed planning can influence project outcomes, reduce risk, and support more sustainable decision-making.

    Alto, a federal Crown corporation, is in the early stages of planning Canada’s first high-speed rail network between Toronto and Québec City. Building on a recently signed Memorandum of Understanding between Alto and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, presenters will discuss how both organizations are working together to integrate environmental considerations into the early stages of project planning.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 1
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • Linear infrastructure design is fundamentally a game of trade-offs played out across a landscape. Choosing whether to cut through a pristine greenfield to the east or acquire private residential properties to the west represents a critical decision-making juncture. While environmental assessment practitioners recognize the value of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) when evaluating fully developed routes, the foundational assumptions made before those routes even exist often escape rigorous scrutiny.

    This presentation explores the impact of pre-assessment decision-making using advanced routing technology and MCDA modeling and will involve interactive audience participation.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 1
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • As Canada works to unlock investment, strengthen sovereignty, and demonstrate its ability to build at pace while respecting environmental and reconciliation commitments, there is increasing pressure to identify efficiencies in regulatory processes. At the same time, regulatory decisions face heightened scrutiny and increasingly diverse stakeholder expectations. Effective and inclusive science communication is therefore essential to support credible and transparent impact assessment processes.

    This session will demonstrate the functionality of the Government of Canada's Open Science and Data Platform as an example of digital innovation that can help streamline and accelerate major project reviews.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 1
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • Canada is pursuing an ambitious agenda to accelerate major infrastructure, energy, mining and resource development projects. At both the federal and provincial levels, initiatives aimed at reducing regulatory burden, shortening approval timelines and eliminating perceived duplication are driving changes to impact assessment processes. This presentation will examine how the evolving mandate to "build faster" is altering the practice of impact assessment under the federal Impact Assessment Act.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 1
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • The Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP) will provide an update on its ongoing efforts to modernize Ontario's environmental assessment program and advance a faster, simpler, and smarter framework. The session will highlight key initiatives, including improvements to the Comprehensive Environmental Assessment process. Attendees will also receive an overview of the new Streamlined Environmental Assessment for Municipal Infrastructure, which comes into effect in January 2027.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 2
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • Drawing on experience from major projects, panelists will discuss how effective IA creates value before regulatory decisions are made. Well-designed assessment processes can improve project design, identify and manage risks, strengthen relationships with rights holders and stakeholders, support adaptive management, and contribute to better long-term outcomes. Rather than asking how assessments can simply be streamlined, this panel will explore how they can be designed more intelligently to gain efficiencies from processes that are coherent, well-scoped, collaborative, and grounded in lived experience. The opportunity now is to build an IA system that is lighter where it should be, stronger where it must be, and ultimately more resilient for the peoples and environments it is meant to safeguard.

    Session Facilitator: Katrina McCullough, GHD
    Session 2
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • As impact assessment practice continues to evolve, practitioners are increasingly challenged to balance rigorous analysis with efficient, focused processes that meet the needs of regulators, proponents, Indigenous communities, and other participants.

    Session Facilitator: Anjala Puvananathan, Impact Assessment Agency of Canada
    Session 3
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • This interactive workshop will explore what the Duty to Consult is, when it applies, and how it is carried out in practice. It will consider the roles, responsibilities, and perspectives of the Crown, Indigenous communities, proponents, stakeholders, and practitioners involved in the consultation process. The sessions will explore lessons learned, challenges, and opportunities.

    Session Facilitators: Alexia Miljus, GFT, Jessica Wright, Consor Canada, Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik
    Session 3
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • This panel will explore the place of impact assessment within the project lifecycle. It will explore the various stages from identification of project needs to project delivery by considering design choices, risk management, and implementation strategies. The panelists will consider the optimization of assessment in the context of the lifecycle.

    Session Facilitator: Sabrina Wong, Dillon Consulting Limited
    Opening & Closing
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • Complimentary appetizers and cash bar.
    Break
    Where
    Craft Beer Market

  • Moderator: Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik
    Opening & Closing
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • TBD

    Session Facilitator: TBD
    Session 4
    Where
    Grand Salon

  • This panel will explore the pivotal first five years of an environmental professional's career. Early career professionals will share their firsthand experiences navigating a rapidly changing work environment and the critical role of emerging technologies in day-to-day operations.

    Session Facilitator: Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik
    Session 5
    Where
    Salon 1

  • This interactive workshop is designed to create a space to learn from one another and collaboratively develop a toolbox of practical approaches that can support more effective impact assessment practice. Drawing on real-world experiences from participants representing different roles and perspectives, the session will explore what strategies have worked, what have not, and what opportunities exist to improve how assessments and approvals are planned, coordinated, and implemented.

    Session Facilitator: Spencer Roth, WSP
    Concurrent Session
    Session 6
    Where
    Salon 2 & 3

  • This interactive session will explore practical approaches for streamlining impact assessment without compromising quality. Through audience polling, facilitated discussion, and practitioner experience, participants will identify common sources of delay, examine where streamlining has succeeded or failed, and discuss practical strategies for improving assessment outcomes in Ontario.

    The session will focus on where assessments commonly lose time, where early project decisions create downstream complexity, and where attempts to accelerate work can weaken trust, engagement quality, or implementation. Participants will reflect on what has worked, what has failed, and what course corrections improved outcomes.

    Session Facilitator: Spencer Roth, WSP
    Concurrent Session
    Session 6
    Where
    Salon 2 & 3

  • As Canada accelerates the deployment of offshore wind generation and expands critical transmission infrastructure, environmental assessments must evolve beyond regulatory compliance to become an adaptive, life-cycle based process that supports the successful delivery of a project. While High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) systems can offer technical and economic advantages for long-distance power transmission, HVDC submarine transmission projects present unique technical, environmental, stakeholder, and constructability challenges that require integrated planning from routing and siting through construction to operation.

    This presentation will highlight lessons learned to reduce project risk, improve environmental outcomes, engage stakeholders, communities and Indigenous partners, and enhance schedule and cost certainty for High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) submarine transmission projects.

    Session Facilitator: Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik
    Session 5
    Where
    Salon 1

  • Ontario’s free-entry mining system allows prospectors to stake mineral claims on Indigenous territories with minimal oversight and no prior consultation. Once staked, these claims grant exclusive exploration rights—often in ways that physically disturb culturally and ecologically significant areas. The duty to consult First Nations is triggered only when prospectors apply for a mineral exploration permit. This presentation will highlight, as illustrated in the Mineral Tracker developed by Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, challenges with these practices in high-activity regions like the Ring of Fire due to the volume of exploration notifications requiring review by Indigenous communities of the implications to continued traditional uses and cultural practices.

    Session Facilitator: Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik
    Session 5
    Where
    Salon 1

  • Drawing on recent project experience in Ontario, this presentation explores how health is increasingly being embedded into mitigation and monitoring frameworks in IA. Examples include the integration of health-based benchmarks into air quality, surface water and aquatic environmental monitoring programs, work camp measures (e.g., dry camp policies, on-site health services, support for land-based activities), health surveys, and community-oriented approaches such as participation in monitoring programs, environmental data sharing, and multi-stakeholder management committees.

    Session Facilitator: Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik
    Concurrent Session
    Session 7
    Where
    Salon 1

  • Ontario has been on the cusp of a crisis for available waste disposal and waste processing capacity for many years. Of all municipal infrastructure, waste management facilities are some of the hardest to successfully steer through the impact assessment and permitting process. One of the most critical issues to address in siting and permitting for these facilities are land use conflicts, and the acceptance (or lack thereof) of these facilities within the community. Our case studies will demonstrate that effective long-term planning that extends beyond the initial facility lifespan of 20 to 25 years, can set the stage for successful future environmental assessments so that this infrastructure can be renewed and support community growth beyond the initial approval.

    Session Facilitator: Spencer Roth, WSP
    Concurrent Session
    Session 8
    Where
    Salon 2 & 3

  • Environmental assessments often culminate in a series of commitments intended to avoid, mitigate, or manage potential environmental effects. While significant effort is devoted to developing these commitments during the assessment process, considerably less attention is given to what happens after project approval and during implementation of the project; It is during detailed design and construction that these commitments are put to the test. The success of an EA is ultimately measured not by the commitments documented in approval reports, but by how effectively they are implemented and whether they achieve the intended outcomes.

    The session will highlight common challenges associated with commitment management, including maintaining accountability across long project timelines, ensuring commitments remain visible through project transitions, and balancing environmental requirements with evolving project needs.

    Session Facilitator: Faiza Waheed, Intrinsik, Alexia Miljus, GFT
    Concurrent Session
    Session 7
    Where
    Salon 1

  • Aggregate extraction licensing projects are uniquely positioned to illustrate the full lifecycle of impact assessment—from early land use planning decisions to long-term site rehabilitation and post-closure outcomes.

    This panel discussion brings together three complementary perspectives including a planner, an ecologist, and a producer to explore how lifecycle thinking can be meaningfully applied across the aggregate sector.

    Session Facilitator: Spencer Roth, WSP, Jessica Wright, Consor Canada
    Concurrent Session
    Session 8
    Where
    Salon 2 & 3

  • This panel will examine how the 2026 OAIA Conference was able to consider the full lifecycle of a project and how assessments can be a tool for shaping resilient, implementable, and outcome-driven projects.

    Session Facilitator: Anjala Puvananathan, Impact Assessment Agency of Canada
    Opening & Closing
    Panel Discussion
    Where
    Grand Salon


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Ontario Bar Association

20 Toronto St #200, Toronto, ON M5C 2B8

The Ontario Bar Association Conference Centre is a modern, fully equipped venue in downtown Toronto, offering flexible spaces, advanced AV and hybrid capabilities, and professional event support, ideal for conferences, meetings, and corporate gatherings.
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The Ontario Association for Impact Assessment (OAIA) was founded in 1994 as a registered not-for-profit organization focused on the practice of impact assessment in Ontario.

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