Thank you, Mr. Bossio.
My starting point would be referring once again to the sparse language we find in the act. Quite frankly, it's inadequate and unacceptable to simply say, “provide an opportunity to participate”. We need further and better detail in the act in terms of the principles and the mechanisms to ensure meaningful public participation.
I fully anticipate that those basic public participation rights will be more fleshed out by regulation. In fact, I said that in my submission to the committee. There may well be a need for further and better guidance material as well, to ensure that we are all on the same page as to how you actually solicit and act upon public input.
The observation I would make is that we have lots of good guidance material from the agencies and others right now as to how to effect or implement meaningful public participation. It's not being done, and I invite you to look at the expert panel report on that very issue. Simply confining public participation requirements to a single sentence in the act was found to be utterly deficient by the expert panel. That's why we need to do better under this legislation.