For one thing, any time there's a significant delay, you're adding economic risk, which will heighten the cost of capital, and that has an immediate impact, which can be fairly significant, to say the least. If you also have construction delays and you've got crews on standby because perhaps you're waiting for a late permit, even though it's been ruled to be in the public interest, that can clock into hundreds of thousands of dollars a day without having any impact whatsoever on the environmental effect.
You also see at the largest scale projects such as the Mackenzie Valley project, for instance, for which Canada may have lost its economic window, and for a whole generation the folks in the north who wanted to see that project go ahead and gain that revenue from their own resources have been scuttled.
We need to be very clear about how timeliness does matter, windows of opportunity for Canada matter, and the costs mount considerably when there are undue delays.
That does not mean we should rush if there are things that need to be looked at, but it does mean we need to be focused on the results that matter and very strategic in how we manage the way in which we use cumbersome processes that don't improve environmental outcome.