I'll try to be quick. On that, I think it would be entirely productive for you to be engaged with first nations that have had both beneficial and poor experiences with CEAA. It would be good to hear from all sides.
AFN takes the position that the government has to respond to this, and we think that would also be an appropriate time for first nations to become engaged. So there are multiple entry points for that.
To follow up again on Monsieur Coderre's point, if there's one thing I could say today in terms of a beneficial change to the act, it would maybe be a statutory basis for that participant funding, because the one thing that's going to be really bad is for that funding envelope to close, and the plan is for it to close. I think that's entirely unproductive at this point. Despite the fact that it's probably going to be renewed in some other form, first nations can't plan activities past March 31, so it's going to slow things down anyway, irrespective of whether the cloud of uncertainty is lifted.
In terms of participant funding, I will say the levels we had in the past, from my perspective, at least, are grossly inadequate. I have the privilege of helping some first nations with actual environmental assessments. I'm a trained environmental scientist from MIT. I have all kinds of trouble deciphering the assumptions that are fed into models to feed some of these outputs, as we'll call them. In some cases, there's an entire absence of data. So if we're going to assume we have a clay underburden or overburden when we have silt, that leads to an entirely different projection.
Those are isolated instances, but my point is that the first nations don't even know about what's in there because the participant funding itself is so meagre. Adding issues about consultation and accommodation means an addition of scientific experts. You have to hire legal experts to be able to engage with the crown, which is fully resourced to deal with those issues.
I don't know what to do about it because it places the burden on first nations and on proponents to deal with issues that I think the crown ought to be dealing with, and particularly, the participant funding program, the main vehicle for doing so, is potentially going to go away.