Mr. Speaker, the problem is that notwithstanding any virtues of the process proposed in Bill C-69, if the minister is the one who will decide whether the process will be applied to a project or not, because the process itself is not mandatory, and if at the end of it the minister is able to simply ignore the outcomes of the process, then no, we would not have a process that is fundamentally better than the one the Harper government had, because the government could ignore it at will.
The major problem with the Harper process as far as I am concerned is that at the end of the day, the government, for whatever reason, could simply ignore the science and the evidence. That fundamentally has not changed.
Incidentally, members looking to the National Post to validate whether or not their policies are progressive are probably barking up the wrong tree.