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ENR Senior Environment Editor Pam McFarland recently spoke with Susan Reisbord, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Edmonton, Alberta-based global consulting firm Stantec, who will take over as president and CEO on Oct. 1.
Reisbord is a member of the advisory board of the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) Global Leadership Forum and a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Executive Consultative Group which supports its Blue Dot network, which provides internationally recognized certifications for sustainable, resilient, transparent and economically efficient infrastructure projects. The conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
ENR: Stantec has worked in the Arctic for quite some time and you said that you are interested in continuing to develop projects in the Arctic region and in the Canadian territories north of the 60th parallel north latitude. Please share more details about it.
Susan Reisbord: About three years ago, shortly after I joined the company, I went to our White Horse office in the Yukon Territory as part of a major geoscience conference, and it really struck me as part of that experience, especially as an environmental scientist with an understanding of the impacts of climate change, that there would be more opportunities. There would be opportunities to exploit that might not have been economic before, but because of climate change, you could now get to some of those resources and it would actually be economic to exploit them.
Also, much was said at the conference about how waters that were once unnavigable, or at least for part of the year, are now navigable, and [what] this will mean for the defense. Not just in Canada, but all over North America.
As a company proudly based in Canada, there was not only a sense of opportunity, but also a sense of obligation due to the new defense requirements that were coming through and a responsibility to our staff of over 60 who have worked there for up to 50 years. It’s not like someone else’s community; it’s our community, and there was a lot of discussion about it.
Stantec also has an office in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and we are in Iqaluit in Nunavut. We have over 100 employees north of the 60th parallel.
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ENR: When you say defence, can you explain how these projects will give more safety and security?
Travel board: The types of projects we’re doing include the wide variety of all our vertical markets: our energy, resources and mining teams, as well as our environment team to ensure that facilities can be built, our infrastructure and construction teams to strengthen them, and of course our water team. So it’s really a comprehensive positioning of Stantec north of 60.
On the defense side, we are part of Arctic Over the Horizon, which is modernizing Canada’s surveillance capabilities and strengthening the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). All of Stantec’s engineering and environmental services are used for this work. The Canadian military has aging infrastructure in places like Alert, Nunavut, the closest base to the North Pole, about 500 miles away. We have made improvements to the infrastructure there.
There is a strategic defense investment of $40 billion, with about $35 billion to defend, build and transform Canada’s North and about $10 billion in major projects already identified. So it’s not just about talking about it; they are doing something about it.
ENR: With huge interest in critical minerals, what is Stantec doing in this space?
Travel Board: We’re already working across the entire mining life cycle for critical minerals, and not just in North America, but globally. We do not see a decline in demand for critical minerals. It is expected to double by 2040, and triple in particular for lithium.
If you look at copper and all the actual projects planned, if they were executed and brought online, we would still have a shortfall of 25% of our needs in 2035. So there is nothing to suggest anything but big tailwinds.
Our Energy and Resources team does all the environmental planning for mining projects: the design around the mining, the processing associated with it and the support structures around the mines.
Related to the Florence copper mine in Arizona, the great thing about this one is that it involves in-situ mining, so we’re avoiding some of the environmental impacts of the open pit approach. You have no on-site blasting, transport or crushing and there is less demand for water and energy. We did basic engineering related to initial planning for recovery and restoration to avoid or mitigate long-term impacts.
