One of the great advances of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in 1992 was that it required the assessment of cumulative environmental effects. That was extremely important: it tried to get at what are admittedly tough problems. Take the tar sands region. How do you say to the first company trying to do work on the tar sands that they have to look at everything that's going to come on downstream? The effects might not have been that great for the first project, and the second project might not have been that great either. But when you add them all up, what you're left with in the tar sands region in northern Alberta is significant air quality problems, a significant risk of failure of tar sands dams, which could wipe out the Athabasca River.... So looking at cumulative effects is important, but it's really difficult.
Under this legislation, that's basically out the window. The capacity of the federal government to do environmental assessment is going to be so dramatically reduced that there will be no serious effort to do cumulative effects assessments. We have no evidence to support the notion that the provincial governments are going to pick up that effort, that the provincial governments are going to somehow replace this lost capacity. Certainly, the provincial premiers, when they have spoken about this bill, have made no indication that they would be ramping up their environmental assessment efforts.
Normally, when the federal government is downloading responsibilities, the first thing provincial governments do is ask for more money. I haven't yet heard Premier Clark or the other premiers ask for more money for environmental assessment.