What is LEAD anyways?
Compliance with an environmental approval can be resource intensive. Due to Alberta Environment's self-monitoring for compliance regime, the obligations to report monitoring results to the department is heavily emphasized. However, it could be that that some areas of a facility's operations might so routinely comply with its applicable approval term that the resources spent on monitoring or reporting could legitimately be spent on other measures to improve environmental performance.

Alberta's LEAD program is an effort to move 'beyond compliance' by introducing an environmental approvals process that allows flexibility to re-deploy resources in a manner acceptable to the government and stakeholders and improve environmental performance above and beyond what regulations require.

A meeting was held in March to attempt to resume progress with the LEAD program. I was sick that day so these notes were forwarded to me in preparation for a second meeting on May 10th.

LEAD Program Stakeholder Meeting 15 March 2005
Attendees represented chemical, forestry, petroleum, rural municipal, ENGO, departmental and public interests. The objectives of this meeting and results were:

1. to get stakeholder views on the proposed two tier approach,
Stakeholders agreed the two tier approach addresses many of the issues that prevented participation in the LEAD Pilot.

2. to get support to proceed with tier-1,
Stakeholders agreed that AENV should proceed with tier-1 , there was some discussion and advice given on modifications to the proposal for implementing tier-1.

3. to obtain advice on proposals for a new program name and identifiers,
No strong preference arose from the three options presented (names and logos), stakeholders encourages AENV to generate additional options, possibly with a stronger link to the industry triple bottom line theme.

Stakeholders did express preferences for a program tag line "Recognizing environmental excellence in Alberta" and preferred tier names: "Tier-1 Recognized Leader" and tier-2 "Certified Champion"

4. to test stakeholder interest in participating in a stakeholder advisory committee for future program development.
The stakeholders attending the meeting agreed a stakeholder advisory committee is desirable and agreed to be the point of contact (not necessarily the participants) for identifying representatives from their sectors.

Alberta Environment's story on this program is at: http://www3.gov.ab.ca/env/protenf/approvals/factsheets/lead.html