Actually, could I respond?
You've asked three questions, but I actually think you've asked one, and it's the question of political will. I know that there's been significant discussion about political will around the table in this committee throughout these hearings. I think that what we talk about when we talk about political will has to flow from the act. The origin of political will flows from the act, because if there is a timeline in the act.... And we saw this with the categorization exercise; we have arguably the most effective part of this act, the one we can all point to and say this is where Canada is a leader, in categorization. The reason we've accomplished that is because there is a timeline. There is a deadline in the act that within seven years of the passage of CEPA in 1999, September 14 of this year, those 23,000 substances had to be categorized. We had to figure out which the most serious substances were.
We think that if you apply this to other stages of the process, we'll get to the action stage that much quicker so that we're not just putting substances in categories, we're actually doing something about the most serious ones. I think the history of this, and other environmental legislation in this country, shows that when we don't have something mandatory in the act that requires the government to make a decision by a certain timeframe, assessments end up sitting on the shelf and we don't end up taking action in a timely way.
The other thing that timelines affect, as you mentioned, is resources. Environment Canada and Health Canada had the resources to complete that process--the budget resources, the personnel resources--because it was a mandatory requirement on the government.