I certainly do. I was a minister at the dawn of the environmental responsibility era. I was part of a government that took that to the point of practice through the development of Canada's first and only green plan and various pieces of legislation that I spoke of earlier.
What I see this bill doing is fast-tracking comprehensive environmental assessments, which ought to be as thorough as they need to be in dealing with major...such as the pipeline through 800 pieces of watershed in British Columbia without resolving the aboriginal interests in those lands. I mean, that's just totally irresponsible to try to push that through.
I think this legislation in its present form is taking us back to the 1970s, where we were before. I have to say, I was the minister who signed the Alcan Kemano agreement. We had very substantial scientific justification for doing what we did, but we didn't get the public engagement aspect correct. Alcan spent several million dollars, bored a tunnel halfway through a mountain, and it was finally overturned.
I had forewarned members of the government that this is where we're headed if we arbitrarily push through this type of legislation to get around appropriate, 21st-century environmental processes and end up getting hung up in court, maybe at huge expense to proponents, by trying to have simple, watertight answers in this legislation, which isn't where they belong at all.
Thank you.