The simple answer is that environmental assessment is patchy across this country. Some provinces do it reasonably well; other provinces do it relatively poorly. It would require a province-by-province and territory-by-territory analysis of the various laws in question. But it's clear to us that one has to understand environmental assessment in this country.
It's not a matter of whether it is a provincial responsibility or a federal responsibility. What we have generated over the past 30 years is an interconnected web of environmental assessment processes that have developed over time so that there can be as little duplication as possible. Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada noted in 2010, in the MiningWatch case, that there are already provisions in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act to ensure that duplication and overlap don't occur.
We've been around this mulberry bush, and we know there is a need to reduce overlap and duplication. This kind of work can always be improved. At the end of the day, there is a role for federal environmental assessment, an important role, particularly in regard to its constitutional jurisdiction over different aspects of the environment. But we need to ensure that we have both levels working together, because the entirety of Canada's environment is not protected when one level of government is doing the environmental assessment. We need both levels of government doing it, and we need them to do it efficiently.