What we've observed over decades—the environmental movement, impacted indigenous communities and experts—is that, across governments, whether federal or provincial, we see this lack of desire to get deep into using their tools. I think there is a tendency to look away because these are powerful companies that we know lobby hard in order to not be regulated.
However, the federal government has two readily available tools that are squarely in its jurisdiction, which could improve the situation when it comes to tailings.
The first one is the Fisheries Act, which I mentioned earlier. It is prohibited to deposit substances said to be deleterious to fish in waters that contain fish or could contain fish, or that enter into bodies that contain fish. Right now, we are told that a key barrier to enforcing the Fisheries Act is a lack of federal information when it comes to contaminants. However, the environment minister hasn't been using all the tools he could under the Fisheries Act to get more information. Some of these could be bilateral agreements with the indigenous nations living on these territories. They are there already and monitor for their own purposes. Using bilateral agreements to share responsibilities when it comes to monitoring, reporting and enforcing would be one way. Companies also conduct a lot of their own monitoring and studies. The environment minister absolutely has the power to request those internal documents to see whether there is helpful information there for enforcing the Fisheries Act.
The last one is more frequent inspections. In 2019, the Auditor General pointed out that metal mines get inspected about every 1.5 years on average. For oil sands mines, it's every 2.5 years on average. We see that there's no proactive monitoring by the federal government. It's much harder to find a violation of the Fisheries Act if you're not looking at whether there's any violation taking place.