This would add a line after line 34. It's adding a proposed subsection 9(9) to say, “The Minister may designate a physical activity where a federal authority is required to make a determination under sections 82, 83 or 84.”
That's making up for the fact that we don't have the law list anymore. It empowers the minister to designate a physical activity for impact assessment where the project is on federal land or federally financed. Currently where the projects are on federal lands, the federal agency has been sidestepping impact assessment, and I'm advised, from a CPAWS study done on decisions between 2012 and 2018, that 500 determinations were issued refusing to do an assessment, even an initial assessment.
I note that the minister made a commitment yesterday to maintaining integrity in the national parks and to ensuring that all impacts on our national parks, and presumably world heritage sites, will now be included. That means we need to put through this amendment, because we have to include things like the Olympics, with which there is some kind of an activity for which federal authority might be required.
The second aspect is that right now that provision, I believe, says that the agency can make that decision. I think the minister should be making that decision, not the agency.