I'm getting nasty stares from my colleagues as well.
I'm almost done.
Slide 15 outlines another set of improvements that Bill C-30 would make to CEPA. The act currently provides the Governor in Council with some flexibility to develop regulations that apply different standards to different parts of the country, based on health or environmental concerns. So the objective would be to provide an equivalent national outcome in terms of environmental or health outcomes. In order to do that, you might need to have regionally differentiated regulations, because, for example, you may have more concentration of industry or emissions in one part of Canada than in another.
Bill C-30 would expand that in two ways. First, it would make it clear that regulations that focus on one or more provinces in particular could be developed. So a region could be defined as a province. That would enable the government, for example, to recognize the fact that a province may have already regulated the air emission—whether it's a greenhouse gas or an air pollutant—to a level that is adequate. Therefore federal regulations need not apply in that area.
In addition, the bill would enable the government to write regulations that distinguish among regulatees on the basis of certain characteristics, like the technology that they use, or the age of the facility. We're not saying, in this bill, that the minister must do that; we're not saying that the minister would ever do that. But this would give the government the authority to do that.
For example, we know that other jurisdictions, including the United States, make this sort of differentiation between, for example, new and old facilities, requiring a new facility to be built at a certain level, but recognizing that you'd be imposing inappropriate or unaffordable costs on an old facility if you required the old facility to immediately upgrade its technology.
Slide 16 summarizes the way in which the bill addresses an oversight in the current regulatory authority provided regarding fuels. We can regulate the producers. We can regulate the gas stations. But we can't actually regulate the intermediate place at which fuel blending occurs. If we want to regulate fuel content to ensure that fuel contains, for example, a certain proportion of renewable energy, then the most efficient way to do that would be to enable us to regulate at the point of blending, and we can't do that. Bill C-30 would enable us to do that.
Bill C-30 would also fill in a couple of small issues we've identified that currently inhibit the government's ability to establish an efficient emissions trading regime. CEPA currently enables us to set up emissions trading, but doesn't enable the ministers to do that in the most efficient manner possible; for example, it doesn't enable the minister to specify maximum and minimum penalties that would be applicable. The bill would correct that problem.
The bill would also clarify that the test for equivalency is not a form test. It's not, “Do you have a regulation in place?” but rather, “Do you have a legal regime in place that will ensure the equivalent environmental or health outcome?” The bill is saying that the ministers aren't in the business of overseeing the provincial governments by saying they need to have a legal instrument of a certain kind. The test is not, “What do you have in place?” but rather, “What would be the effect or the outcome on environmental and human health?” If it's equivalent, then that's good enough.
Finally, on the cross-cutting elements I spoke about, the entire enforcement regime, all the public participation authorities and obligations that are imposed on the government, and the ongoing role of the national advisory committee, which provides for provincial, territorial, and aboriginal input into decision-making, all of those features of CEPA would continue to apply to actions taken to address air pollutants and greenhouse gases.
Indeed, many of the provisions you see in Bill C-30—if you've actually tried to wade through the bill—simply add air pollutants and GHGs to those cross-cutting provisions. They're not changing those provisions substantively; they're just ensuring that all of those provisions apply to air pollutants and GHGs.
I'll stop there. I appreciate that I've gone overtime; I've covered a lot of ground. We'll be here after the vote to answer to answer any questions you have.