IAIA CEO Gary Baker sat down with long-time IAIA member A. John Sinclair, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award. For more than 30 years, John has been a staunch champion of impact assessment, dedicated to community service and sharing his knowledge with others, and working to expand and strengthen theoretical foundations and practical implementation.
Watch the video now (and find the full transcript below).
Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello again. I'm here going through our interview sessions with the recipients of our awards this year. This one gives me real pleasure to welcome Dr. John Sinclair, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Lifetime Achievement Awards are typically -- as the name suggests -- a culmination of a lot of effort over a long period of time. So to understand what that period of time has entailed -- welcome, John! Please tell us a little about your backstory and how you ended up sitting in Manitoba, enjoying this conversation.
Dr. John Sinclair, Award Winner: Thanks so much, Gary. It’s amazing to be honored by getting this award, and I really appreciate the time you are taking to talk with the award winners. I watched the videos from last year, so I look forward to seeing how this one turns out. Yes, it is a long history. Some people will be wondering, “Why Winnipeg? How did you wind up in Winipeg?” It’s the center of Canada -- actually, I drive by quite often the actual geographic center of Canada on the Trans-Canada Highway just outside of Winnipeg. It's often recognized as being a very cold place, but I came here for an opportunity to teach at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Manitoba, which is a graduate institute. Actually, I really wanted to say at some point during our discussion that having been able to work with graduate students for my whole career here at the university has offered the opportunity to work with great people and to think in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise done about impact assessment. I’m really thrilled with some of the things those graduates have gone on to do after leaving here. I did some work at universities in Ontario—Carleton University and then at Waterloo, working with Bob Gibson, who many people will know who listen to this video through the IA community. I got engaged first, before I went to Waterloo, in impact assessment around waste management, and then that sort of just continued after I got associated with Bob Gibson and started doing work with him. We wound up teaching a course to engineers who wanted to learn about impact assessment -- that's 35 years ago now, maybe longer.
Gary: You mentioned that sort of interplay between academia and practice. I remember talking with Alan Bond in another conversation, and he was saying that from where he'd started to where it is now, there seems to have been a drift apart between the practice and academia. That was partly because of UK regulations and legislation. But what's your sense of that sitting in Canada?
John: Yeah, I think I feel a little bit differently about that, but that could be partly associated with the program I'm in and what some of my my graduates are doing. Somia won an award last year from IAIA for the work that her company, Narrative, is doing with Harmonized Impact Assessment. I think I have three of my graduates that are working with Somia, so I sort of stay connected. We do quite a bit of work with an aquatic consulting group, North/South Consulting, here, also with Intergroup Consulting. Obviously I'm in a smaller bowl, not just in Canada but in Manitoba, so it's hard to do very much without running into other people in the impact assessment community. My interest is wide-ranging, but my practice interest is more through engaging in impact assessment, through being a participant, through coming and raising questions and issues and helping communities do that. I guess that entry point may be a little bit different than academics that are working with consulting firms doing studies on fish or fish habitat or something like that. I would say there's probably less of that going on.
Gary: If you think back to when you started out and some of the issues you were facing then, what would you say the biggest differences are now to what you were encountering then?
John: That's a tricky question to answer because I'd like to be able to say to you that it's amazing how much progress we've made. But despite concerted effort by a whole bunch of people, not just in government, but in industry, in practitioners, consultants, academia... But there have been changes. Obviously there's way more impact assessment being practiced around the globe for sure -- we often reference that in the papers and books -- which is great. There's incorporation of a broader scope of impact assessment, and that's something we've certainly been pushing. I'm interested in sustainability transitions -- in transitioning to a more sustainable society -- and I see impact assessment as a key tool in trying to achieve those things. I think that discussion has really matured. Whether decision makers are keeping up with some of the discussion that's going on is another issue.
Gary: Do you think there's still that sort of understanding of the procedural side of impact assessment rather than the strategic side? Is that still an issue?
John: I think it's still an issue for sure. I think that unfortunately impact assessment, instead of looking at some of the outcomes, the focus is often on how long the process took. That's very frustrating, and I think we're in a time right now where we really need to to double down on the benefits of looking before we leap. From the planning benefits, from my perspective, that's one of the key points that we need to continue to promote as impact assessment professionals -- that key aspect of assessment -- because in the rush to do things, we may trample over environmental justice issues, people's rights, Indigenous rights, the environment, and live to regret it as we have in the past. We don't have to look very far to see some of the messes that we've made. We have huge challenges, so I really think it's a time to double down on some of those benefits that assessment has and push back against some of the changes that are being suggested.
Gary: Looking ahead, the theme of the next conference is how technology comes into the industry. Do you see that as generally a positive, as long as we can hang on to that human assessment element? Or do you see it as a bit more of an existential threat?
John: I think it's all in how it's managed, like everything else, I guess. I'm very concerned about how it will be used in some jurisdictions in particular. Tools that may help to generate information that the public may be concerned about that actually isn't from the public at all, so using AI for all sorts of different reasons and in different ways that reduce the time that it takes to do an assessment, because a lot of the time is taken up in doing studies and talking to people, in trying to figure out the potential impacts on fish or wildlife or whatever it is that a project might impact. We've already had issues in the broader impact assessment community of assessments being reused for different projects. That was before this advent of new technology, so we really need to figure it out. Hopefully we'll get some answers at the conference this year.
Gary: Of course we will! Maybe one final question on this. Here you are, looking at this career, assessing Lifetime Achievement. What would be the advice that you would give your younger self as you enter this profession? What would you have liked to have known?
John: How patient you have to be! I expect some of my colleagues would disagree that we have made tremendous strides improvements in the types of projects that are undertaken and often we overlook that. Many people that participate are looking to stop projects. Here in Manitoba, it's called the Environmental Approvals Branch, so they're actually supposed to approve projects not reject them. So it's the way that we approve those projects and the conditions, and I think that that we've come a long way. We have many, many different types of institutions undertaking impact assessment processes now, which is awesome. We need to keep up that momentum somehow. But thinking back, I don't know! That's a great question. Other than being patient -- it takes a long time, and a lot of the issues come back around. Actually I was just studying for another project, and I found this old CD (you know the old discs we used to plug into our computers), and it had all this past work that the Government of Canada had funded through an institute they had created to do IA research, and the issues haven't changed, Gary! The issues are the same. We may think about them a bit differently, but a lot of those issues still remain. So you need to be patient. The yard sticks move slowly but they do move.
Gary: That's a very fitting conclusion. Thank you for sharing a little bit of that wisdom with us. Congratulations on the award, and I look forward to seeing what happens next. You still have a lot more achievement, I suspect, still within you.
John: I hope so! And a lot more IAIA conferences, I hope.
