I would say—and it has been pointed out in several instances here—that UNDRIP isn't really on the table in Alberta. Dan mentioned that there's a multi-tiered hierarchy of rights that exists within Alberta but also across Canada. If you look at the Yahey decision in B.C. and the lack of action on cumulative effects in Alberta, the substance and quality of your constitutional rights as an indigenous person vary depending on the province in which you live, and I don't think that is either the spirit or the letter of our Constitution. I can't imagine many of the rights we all enjoy as Canadians varying so greatly depending on where we live or on our ethnic background.
This issue, as has been mentioned, is a systematic issue. It's not an issue of just asking, “How are you going to improve your communications protocol, because you should have communicated earlier?” This is a systematic issue that covers a range of areas, like how impact assessment is conducted, how the duty to consult is discharged and how liabilities are managed in the energy sector, where you have this chronic and systematic regulatory capture. That's the term, but it's in the sense that the regulator is constantly pulling the direction of the conversation in the interests of the regulated parties rather than the public interest.
The real question we need to get at here is what can be done to change this in Alberta, because it is a chronic problem and it is one of the underlying issues we need to address. It is not just about changing Alberta or the AER's communications protocol. It's about how to build a regulator that is truly independent of the industry it's regulating and is able to discharge the public interest and hold the public confidence.