I've been invited just this second to be next, so I will take the honour.
I'm very pleased to be here. This is the third or fourth time I have been before this committee over a long time—20 years—and I'm always honoured to do this. I am arriving in my personal capacity, but I am one of the four, the gang of four, that wrote the expert panel report. I will say that although I'm not speaking for the other three, I'm very happy to defend any part of that report. I'm still very proud of it and I am happy to speak to any part of it that may assist you in what you're up to.
The other thing I'll say is that I'm a bit like Stephen. We've crossed paths. Stephen didn't quite illuminate how far back he goes, but the very first federal court case that happened to get EA in play in the late 1980s was part of the machinations of Stephen Hazell, for whoever he was working for or with then. He is an esteemed member of how law came to environmental assessment. I'm a little behind that, but I've done two books on federal environmental assessment, one in 1994, believe it or not, on the first 20 years, and now I have a current guide. I come at this with a great deal of interest.
The final thing I want to say just on background is about the panel report. I will speak to one part of it only, but I do want to say here on the record that it's an integrated vision. One of the things that may make it helpful to the committee is that if you want to ask me about a specific thing, we tried to balance all of the interests in the constituencies that we thought were relevant to this: the first nations, the industry, the government, the public, and the provinces. We tried to figure out how all of them had a legitimate role, so pulling one piece out of our report is not likely to be terribly helpful because it's not capturing all of the things that we tried to balance together.
Now, having said that, I am going to say one thing and, strangely enough, it echoes something I said in 1994. I said it in 1994 because it was powerful then. It is that I believe the federal EA law needs a CRTC-like model. It needs a tribunal, full stop. In 1994 I wrote 25 pages for this committee or its predecessor on how to do that. I'm not going to do that again here. The panel gave you a vision on why that's important.
What I want to say very quickly on this topic is about the thing that a tribunal can do. It spoke for itself well then as a model because, unlike a court, the facts and the experts are all relevant. Every time we go to court, we throw out the facts and the experts, and we deal with the law. That surely is not the way to do the best EA. Similarly, notwithstanding how noble they are and how much time our federal ministers and agencies want, they are not the same thing as an independent tribunal in how well they balance and address expertise.
That's the CRTC piece, but now you have one more piece to this that in my view makes it even more imperative, more vital, that you do this. If you are going to have EA deal with the rights of indigenous peoples, which you must in order to deal with UNDRIP, which you must to deal with our Constitution—and you've now embraced that—how are you going to do that without some kind of body that can adjudicate what a “right” is? I believe it needs to be adjudicative, because otherwise the only place you go is court. We surely do not want to have court as the only place where you can talk about rights and get an answer.
What I say is that we really need a speedier, expert-based process to adjudicate the vital question of rights. If you read the panel's report, you'll see that we tried to address consent within a framework of a tribunal. The consent was not absolute; it was embedded in a framework. I cannot see a better way to do that. I'm happy to hear of an alternative, but going to court is not an alternative to that.
Thank you very much for your time. I'm here to try to assist.