Madam Minister, as you know, I'm disappointed by C-69, but I have hopes, and all the hopes I have for the bill being repaired have to do with the degree.... You prefaced your remarks often by saying what we heard in consultations before the bill for first reading, but I hope that you've heard a lot of the witnesses who have come before this committee with really big concerns that this bill will not rebuild trust. It's not all about transparency and consultation. It's often about whether the bill will work. I just want to focus on one piece, because I hope you heard from the expert panel that was convened that did really great work.
One of the things they mentioned was that environmental assessment—or impact assessment, if we will—of projects under federal jurisdiction is not just about major projects. Smaller projects can have really negative environmental impacts not caught by provincial EAs. I could mention a couple of projects. I will mention one right now. It was a shocker. It was the jet fuel line built in the Vancouver International Airport that Minister Garneau didn't know about that got signed off by the port authority, which wasn't the sort of thing that we might have thought of in a project review.
A project-by-project list can miss things. The only way to make sure we don't miss things is to cast the net wider, as we used to, and then make sure we're not wasting a lot of time on deep-dive reviews of things that don't need them. Small projects, though, can have a big impact.
I'm wondering if you're open to amendments that will allow us to have environmental assessment legislation, impact assessment legislation, that really rebuilds trust by going back to the pre-Harper days, which we had from 1976 until 2012, of assessing every project under federal jurisdiction.