Thank you, Chair.
Thanks to our officials for being here today.
I'm going to jump right in, because I have a bunch of questions, and if I have time left over, I'm going to pass it on to my colleagues.
In the changes that were brought in through the last couple of omnibus budget bills, there were two that resulted in big changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, and as a result to its budget. The repeal of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and gutting of the Navigable Waters Protection Act mean that only a handful of the projects that would have been assessed under the 1995 CEAA are now being assessed. My information is that just under 1% are being assessed. So with only a handful of rivers and lakes protected under navigable waters, hundreds of thousands of lakes, a thousand in my riding actually, could have pipelines, or bridges, or other works built, without triggering any kind of environmental assessment that would have been triggered before.
The new CEAA 2012 regulations were announced a couple of weeks ago, and there are holes, in my opinion, in the list of projects that now require an environmental assessment—pipelines, offshore drilling, just as examples. How exactly was this list arrived at? What is the process for amending it? And how did you decide that it was no longer worthwhile examining projects that cross navigable waters, for example?