There are guidelines that were put in place in 2004 by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and PCO. But they're voluntary guidelines. This is a self-assessment process. It's up to each department and agency to define, first of all, the nature of an important environmental effect. They define this for themselves.
Each department has its own method of doing strategic environmental assessments. We found that many are slipping through the cracks. We did not look at each proposal in detail, nor did we look at the quality of the assessments themselves. What we can say is that CIDA, for example, has done at least 89 strategic environmental assessments. Some were 100 pages long. Other departments are doing strategic environmental assessments that might be a paragraph long.