To some extent I might bring my work when I was on the six-person panel to look at the monitoring going on in the oil sands, for example, which Liz Dowdeswell reported in 2010.
There are issues. A monitoring program requires a scientific base to be totally transparent, and also to be flexible, because science changes as it goes forward. What we saw in a monitoring program such as that is that consultants and so forth were doing pretty well what they were tasked to do, but there wasn't sufficient scientific oversight to determine if we were getting worthwhile answers. A lot of money is being wasted in some of these monitoring programs.
Many people get these results. They talk about getting binders and binders of data but they're never analyzed and they're never critically assessed. The effort is not put into seeing what the monitoring has done.