I'm going to give an indirect answer, because I think it's important to differentiate between, on the one hand, what's in the statute and what the statute either requires the government to do or enables us to do and, on the other, how the government in the past and the present has actually implemented the statute.
To answer your question, I personally don't see anything in CEPA that impedes us from taking the kind of action that Bruce would like us to take.
Why haven't we? Fundamentally, I would argue those are political decisions. On the issue of federal leadership, the act gives us authority to address a wide range of issues. The extent to which we've chosen to exercise that authority has been, and will continue to be, a political decision. The judgment about whether we were right or wrong is not for me to say. What I'm trying to do is differentiate the statute and what it provides for from how it has been implemented.
Similarly, on judgments about how precautionary Environment Canada or Health Canada have been, I don't see anything in CEPA that impedes the departments or the ministers from taking precautionary decisions.
The comment on the department's emphasis on stakeholder consultations is a fair one. I think one can find that those processes--which are not mandated under CEPA, and which are an implementation decision--can at times become circular and lead to lowest-common-denominator types of outcomes. Nothing in CEPA requires them. Nothing in CEPA impedes the minister from saying she doesn't care what that process says, this is the decision.