Well, I think in order to design a sound, robust monitoring program, you need good science, and the science has to start somewhere. There's no reason to expect proponents to be doing that.
I think proponents are sometimes asked to do far too much with respect to impact assessment. It's actually the job of governments to do the baseline research and the ongoing monitoring and to do it in a way that will prove useful for environmental assessment.
So if you don't have the science capacity...and I don't know who else is going to do it if it's not the proponents--well, I mean, it isn't the proponents, or shouldn't be, I don't think. Governments have to maintain their science capacity to be able to design such programs. Just collecting data and throwing them into a computer without having some serious way of analyzing them, without having a hypothesis about cause and effect, about what it is about this project that might cause harm....
To be able to test that with measurable indicators is the challenge. I don't see it happening a whole lot. Part of the reason it's not happening a whole lot is because people don't devote time to talk about it.
I'll give you the example of the cumulative impact monitoring program in the Northwest Territories. This was announced some years ago by a previous government with great fanfare. I have to tell you that during our review of the Mackenzie gas project, we heard a great deal about how it wasn't working. It's just not happening.
I know that governments have...and in fact this government has put some money into that program, but it doesn't have any overarching design. It doesn't have any program. It's just throwing money at things that so-and-so wants to do, or that this community wants to do, or whatever. You'll never get a serious result that way.