I need to clarify that I'm not here as a lawyer, nor are we providing legal advice to the committee. However, the Quebec hydro case has been public for decades, and it has been fairly well reviewed and understood.
In its essence, the Supreme Court.... First of all, there were a number of different decisions on the part of different members of the court that led to the court deciding that the particular use of a regulation under part 5 of the act was constitutional. Without getting into all of the details, I think the general thrust of the decisions that supported part 5 were that the act establishes a process that requires the government to identify particularly significant risks, starting with monitoring, information gathering and a formal risk assessment, and then a conclusion goes to the Governor in Council that leads to the listing of the substance and then the development of a regulation to address that risk. There is a gradual process of identifying really significant risks, which then justifies the federal government's stepping in and taking action to prevent those risks to the Canadian environment as a whole and to the health of Canadians as a whole.
Again, it's our view that we're not changing the nature of that process; in fact, we are attempting to refine that process by adding additional authority to identify specific substances that are of particular concern and that merit a particular track of risk management.