Thank you, Mr. Mills.
When I was before the committee last year, I made a substantive opening statement. I won't do that today. I'll just take a couple of minutes to share with the committee two quotes that help me maintain a sense of context and perspective when discussing institutional legal changes like the act before us today.
The first quote is by William Ruckelshaus, a former Republican head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency:
Can we move nations...in the direction of sustainability? Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes: the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic, and the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries. These revolutions were gradual, spontaneous, and largely unconscious. This one will have to be a fully conscious operation, guided by the best foresight science can provide. If we actually do it, the undertaking will be absolutely unique in humanity’s stay on earth.
The World Commission on Environment and Development, in Our Common Future, offered this profound insight:
...in the end, sustainable development is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs. We do not pretend that the process is easy or straightforward.
Your inquiries on the Canadian institutional change process in this area prove that the change process, indeed, is neither easy nor straightforward. As a committee, you've received the 2006, 2007, and 2008 reports of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. Ron Thompson has said to you that the fundamental tools of the Canadian experiment--sustainable development strategies, strategic environmental assessment, for example--are essentially broken and incomplete in the absence of an overarching federal sustainable development strategy.
The bill before us is therefore not just another piece of legislation, but is a positive historic step, part of the iterative, transformative institutional change process both Brundtland and Ruckelshaus refer to. Therefore, I submit it is crucial to get it right and make the act meaningful.
Thank you.