After tracking thousands of assessments over a decade, the peer-reviewed findings of Derrick de Kerckhove suggest a great majority of Fisheries Act environmental reviews over the last decade were completed well within recommended timelines. Nor was there a bottleneck of projects being held up by a clogged review process, he said.

"We didn't find any. Even when the input was high, it seemed to be handled very well." De Kerckhove, a University of Toronto PhD candidate, analyzed 10 years of data from Department of Fisheries and Oceans annual reports on the progress of environmental assessments triggered under the Fisheries Act. That legislation generates more such reviews than almost any other - anywhere from 7,700 to more than 12,000 in a single year.