Environment committee  I do so at my peril, I guess.

Environment committee  The comparisons between what happens with birds in Toronto and what happens with fish in oil sands are not what we get into. But there are many factors considered when we're trying to figure out how much is enough. And one of them I mentioned earlier was how much an ecosystem cou

Environment committee  To be clear, it's in effect until 2010.

Environment committee  There are discussions beginning on how we want to get started on phase two, but I'd say they're preliminary at this stage. Our understanding is that we should be looking at water quality in that second phase, but again it's still early days.

Environment committee  Again, we'll look to CEMA, an organization with currently 44 members, to debate and work through these questions with their task groups. Part of what we've committed to with the province—I'm saying DFO and the federal government—on the issue of water management framework is that

Environment committee  I'll take a stab at it. CEMA is, as you said, a multi-stakeholder organization set up to advise, as I've been told, the Alberta government in its decision-making process. It's a discussion forum to see whether they can reach consensus on how to manage the issues related to the

Environment committee  CEMA is an advisory body.

Environment committee  To begin with, the watershed issues related to oil sands are one element of what CEMA looks at. It's the one that I talked about, because that's my world. On the water management framework, that discussion began in one of the working groups of CEMA, but it was concluded by the pr

Environment committee  I think what your question gets at is this: when are the cases in which there's a significant environmental impact? That's the term we use to distinguish between what we can live with and what we can't.

Environment committee  It's a scientific analysis, looking at the impact of the project. As I mentioned, in the last four projects that we've looked at, we decided, on the basis of cumulative effects, that the environmental impact could be significant. It's a question of the likelihood of there being a

Environment committee  It is. You're correct.

Environment committee  You're correct. There is a section in the Fisheries Act that regulates the deposition of deleterious substances, which is what we're talking about. But DFO has delegated that responsibility to Environment Canada, because it's the department that deals with pollution.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  That's correct. This is a model that looks at volume and flow.

Environment committee  It's not my area of expertise, but—