I think what you have to consider when you're thinking in broad terms about the right to a healthy environment is that it's really like any other human right, whether it's the right to freedom of expression or the right to freedom of religion; it's a broad concept and it's actually easier to define in terms of its violation than define exactly what it entails.
So over time, what we've seen in the countries where there is legal recognition for the right to a healthy environment is that it acts as a stimulus to raising standards, to raising air quality standards, raising water quality standards, and raising protection for biological diversity in a way that happens in a systemic fashion. One of the problems we've had in Canada is that we have been upgrading our environmental laws in an ad hoc fashion, and that's why some of the advanced features of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, for example, are not found in other Canadian environmental laws, like the National Parks Act or the Fisheries Act.
I think another thing that this act will do in terms of stimulus is that we already have some very progressive Supreme Court of Canada decisions recognizing in fact that there is a basic value that Canadians have, which is protection of the right to a healthy environment. The Supreme Court of Canada has stated that on two different occasions. But what has really been Canada's Achilles heel is not so much the legal framework; it has been the implementation and enforcement of the legal framework.
I recently did a quick calculation: if you add up all of the fines, penalties, convictions, and prosecutions under federal Canadian environmental law over the past three decades, you get less environmental enforcement than there is in a single year of enforcement by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. We haven't given enough resources, we haven't had strong enough penalties, and we haven't applied the political will to enforce the laws we have.
One of the most important things about Bill C-469 is that it facilitates the enforcement of Canadian environmental laws and, by so doing, increases respect for the laws that Parliament has enacted.