Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thanks to all of our witnesses for being here today.
I actually was at an opening of a construction site for a new mine in my riding of Okanagan—Coquihalla. It's a small silver mine, and when it's actually up to production levels, 30% of the jobs will be for first nations, so certainly a lot of the issues today are very pertinent to what's happening in my riding.
There were some earlier comments, both from a few of our witnesses as well as from our committee, in regard to federal-provincial...so I'll start with that.
In 2009, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment recommended the addition of substitution provisions as a means to manage federal-provincial overlap and duplication. I'd like to focus on that.
Some provinces and industry associations have also suggested the addition of provisions to allow the federal process and decision-making to stand down if there is an equivalent provincial environmental assessment. So my question to MAC is, should substitution and equivalency be included in the act?