Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Gregory Thomas. I'm the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We are Canada's oldest and largest taxpayer advocacy group, founded in 1990, with 72,000 supporters across the country.
We appreciate the invitation to participate in these hearings and will welcome your questions.
I think it's no secret that the process of environmental assessment is not a popular one in Canada on any side. Mr. Kneen has a copy of the comparison of the British Columbia and the federal assessments of the Prosperity mine, which is a $1 billion project that would have generated tens of thousands of jobs in British Columbia. The federal government blocked that project, yet everyone who participated in the whole process was unhappy with it, regardless of the outcome. It was long, time-consuming, and costly for the people who were trying to build the mine; and costly for the people who were trying to oppose it.
The universal belief at the end was that the key issues hadn't been addressed, and that as a civil society we hadn't come together to figure out how to build that mine in a way that would not affect the environment for all generations. So it was a long, costly, and frustrating process. What we recognize as taxpayers increasingly is that environmental assessment processes attract the involvement of people who bring nothing new to the table. They bring nothing new in the way of facts, new information, research, or constructive proposals on how we can move forward and protect the environment, create jobs, and work together.
So the process is broken and I believe the amendments to the legislation contained here represent, at the very least, an attempt by a government in Canada to address the fact that the process is broken and serves people very poorly.
I will speak to what I believe is an overlooked element of environmental assessment that the government needs to incorporate into its future process, and that is the whole issue of quantifying damage and of quantifying the costs, both of legislation, regulation, and new development. We know that in the case of the Prosperity mine in British Columbia there were costs imposed on the environment, on the traditional hunting and fishing, on the aboriginal peoples' traditional territories, and on the environment itself.
We also know there are massive financial benefits that could be extracted to offset those costs. But what we found was that in a sea of inflammatory rhetoric, there was insufficient will on the part of all the players to create a situation that would lead to increased prosperity for everyone and protection of the environment. There was a win there, and collectively, we weren't able to work to that win. Collectively, at the end of the road a tremendous amount of public money had been spent, and there had been no constructive outcome.
A similar example is the Mackenzie Valley pipeline.
I think it's fair to say there's quite a bit of public support for the Mackenzie Valley pipeline in 2012, and yet processes have ground on so long that the natural gas price will no longer support the construction of the pipeline. So you have a situation where communities in the Northwest Territories are converting from natural gas back to diesel fuel, because they no longer have access to supply.
We've seen historically where a failure to quantify the economic value of the way we manage natural resources has had catastrophic outcomes, if you look at the Newfoundland cod fishery, or as was discussed the night before last in this committee, the Great Lakes fishery. Decisions were taken piecemeal to destroy fisheries habitat and no one quantified the value of what was being destroyed.
I'm happy that Mr. Fisher is here from the Upper Fraser Valley, because we have a large number of supporters who live in the municipalities he discussed. I think possibly there was something in it when they sent someone named Fisher to represent the farmers.
In that situation, there's been no effort to quantify the costs and benefits of the species at risk protection initiatives that are being undertaken in the Upper Fraser Valley. Canada has one of the most poorly developed systems of recognizing the damage that's done to individuals by government regulation. Whereas in Europe, both at the state level and the European Union level, the regulations that are being unleashed on the farmers in the Fraser Valley would automatically trigger massive financial compensation, in Canada we can basically neutralize farmers' land, flood it, leave it under water. These people are subjected to hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs and there's no compensation.
Mr. Fisher referred to the Nooksack dace and the Salish sucker, which are identified as species at risk. In the case of these species, activist groups actually went to court to force DFO to develop plans to protect these species. So it wasn't even an initiative originally of the Government of Canada; they were forced into it by their own legislation. Because there is no way to quantify the massive costs of the protection plans that are being proposed, and the costs to individuals aren't even considered in our legal system, you get environmental initiatives with massive, outrageous, exponential costs on individuals.
One of the most hilarious things about this particular plan that Mr. Fisher is here to talk about is that one of the original and largest habitats for the Salish sucker is on the Little Campbell River, where the species was extirpated approximately 30 years ago. Little Campbell River is in the middle of the largest regional park in greater Vancouver, Campbell River Park. Given the choice of setting up a program in a regional park that would actually have an on-budget impact—the Government of Canada would have to go to taxpayers and say, “We're taxing you and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore this obscure fish to a thriving status”—instead it's costing hundreds and hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of dollars in damage to individuals to reclaim farmers' ditches for the same purpose. This is a perverse thing that we hope this committee and this government will put to a finish.
Thank you.