Well, my apologies to the witnesses. I would like to thank you for coming out today to talk about the amendments, but I do have to address some of my colleague's points here.
We started our meeting off today with my colleague opposite asking for additional time on Monday to have further witnesses, which I, Mr. Chair, am amenable to. I am more than happy to allow this to happen, to look at other times to deal within a subcommittee, but I have a conflicting message from my colleague here and, frankly, I am outraged.
We have a history of working well in this committee. We have witnesses sitting here who are ready to talk to.... I think there are only eight clauses here, seven of them minor concordance issues, but we have the opportunity today to look through this. We made a decision as the committee to review this component of the bill, and yet we've just spent half an hour of the time of the witnesses who proposed these.... In fact, we have the vice-president of policy for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency here to look at these clauses today, and we just spent half an hour talking about why we shouldn't be looking at them. I'm not sure what the NDP's message is on this, frankly.
Do you want to review these clauses or not? Frankly, I do. I cannot believe that we just sat here talking about this after we've been trying to find additional time for witnesses to come out and to work collaboratively to review these amendments. Frankly, I'm flabbergasted.
As committee members, we've had over a week with this letter in front of us, whereby we could all do our due diligence on the technicalities of each aspect of the clauses. I've certainly done that. I know that my colleagues down the way have done that as well. They've sent me questions that we've been trying to work back and forth on in trying to get clarification to make sure that it's consistent with the existing legislation—point blank, doing our jobs as legislators instead of sitting here and talking about whether or not we should be looking at this.
I'm just not sure what the message is today. I cannot believe that we just spent half an hour doing that.
Mr. Chair, I do appreciate your ruling on this, but the last point I'm going to make on this is something that I want on the record, and that's that my colleague said that we have a fake belief for meaningful discussion on these clauses here today. We gathered here as a standing committee of the Parliament of Canada to review these. It was a decision that our committee made, and to say that in front of witnesses who are here, and who are technical experts on the subject, is frankly outrageous. I certainly hope that my colleagues will get their message in alignment, that will work with us.... If there are additional witnesses we need to have on Monday and work on a subcommittee on Monday afternoon—whatever—to meet the deadline that has been tasked with us by the finance committee, I am more than amenable to that. I will put that on the record right now, Mr. Chair.
I certainly hope that we can take the rest of the time to review the amendments with the witnesses who are here. Let’s move on.
Ms. Cutts, do any of the proposed amendments to CEAA 2012 in Bill C-45 represent a change in policy intent?