Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is good of Mr. Moffet that he give us a little bit of the history of equivalency, because that is at the very heart of the debate today. The reality is that the provisions of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as they are presently drafted, have not convinced the majority of provinces to sign equivalency agreements. Perhaps I am mistaken — you did not mention this —, but to date, Alberta is the only one to have signed an equivalency agreement with the federal government. What is fundamental in this, is that you must take into account systems that are sometimes, and even very often, different in the provinces. Without being a brake, this is a reality that prevents the enforcement of the provisions of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act that provide for regulatory equivalency. These differences between systems make it difficult to establish equivalency agreements.
When we read the changes with regard to equivalency outlined in Bill C-30, at the outset we wondered if we were on the right track. This allows, precisely, for not enforcing rules that would be directly imposed and copied in a province. This will not necessarily deliver the results you might expect under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. At the same time, we are aware of the fact that environmental groups want to see results and there was perhaps some fuzziness with regard to these simple effects related to equivalency. This is why we believe that even more benchmarks should be established. This was not our original position, but we wound up rallying to the idea that it is indeed necessary to better define this equivalency based upon the effects, taking into account the results, and that these results should also be quantifiable. In our view, tying the equivalency of effects to the fact that they must be quantifiable is a step in the right direction and gives us more flexibility. It is also a way of ensuring that equivalency will not apply without some guarantee of concrete results on the part of the provinces. I believe that this is the spirit of the amendment brought forward by the government and, it is to my mind a good compromise between the two schools of thought.