Absolutely. The ability to start construction before the full impacts of the project are understood, before consultation is completed and before indigenous communities may have disclosed impacts on their rights.... We'd get ahead of ourselves.
The precautionary principle guides environmental legislation internationally and in Canada. It says that we must look before we leap. We must understand what we're doing before we do it. By authorizing early construction, we'd permit environmental consequences without fully understanding the scale and scope of what they would mean for us in the future.