Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I suspect, given the lateness of the hour and the number of evening meetings you've had this week, that I'm appreciating my being here a lot more than you are. But I do appreciate the committee's taking the time to hear from us and I commend you for your diligence. I've been reading the transcripts through the week and you've certainly provided the opportunity for a very vigorous debate.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce is a big organization, the largest business association in Canada. We have more than 700 direct members and a network of chambers of commerce and boards of trade that represents nearly 200,000 businesses across the country. I mention this not to boast but just to say that in establishing our policies we have a resolution process that culminates in the adoption of resolutions at our annual meetings. I feel that we're credible, and that our resolutions represent a large constituency.
I'm going to use the short time I have for this statement to talk about context. I'm sure we'll get to the details of part 3 in our questions.
In February, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce issued a paper called, “The Top 10 Barriers to Competitiveness in Canada”. It was prepared in consultation with our membership. Very prominent among the barriers that we identified was regulatory inefficiency. We have long argued that the current federal environmental regulatory system is flawed, extremely inefficient, and has unnecessary duplication that hampers competitiveness in the Canadian economy while sometimes doing very little to improve environmental protection.
The federal assessment regime affects a very broad range of Canadian businesses in every industry in every region. It's not about one particular sector or industry. I have members in the renewable energy business who feel that they will benefit significantly by reforms in this area.
Canada needs an environmental regulatory system that accomplishes two things. First, it has to protect the environment, human health, and society. We have at the chamber a long record of environmental regulation proposals in support of environmental regulation. We see it as a cornerstone and not an impediment to business competitiveness. I hope I can be believed on that point. The chamber believes that good regulation is a solid contributor to business competitiveness. We look around the world and see that some of the most competitive economies in the world—Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore, and Finland—are heavily regulated societies. So we are not opposed to regulation, but we call for efficient and competent regulation.
Second, the system has to provide proponents and opponents with a timely and predictable process. In this regard, the current system is clearly failing and failing quite badly. In 2011, the World Economic Forum listed an inefficient bureaucratic process as the most problematic factor in doing business in Canada. If we were setting out to design a review process from scratch, I suspect that nobody would design the system we have in Canada today—two sovereign governments with equal authority, both conducting an assessment of the same project independently, usually without any cooperation between them.
In the submission to the CEAA review this winter, the B.C. government attacked the inefficiencies of having two separate information registries, two different public consultation requirements, two different technical reports. B.C. noted that it had ruled on 115 environmental assessment certificates under its own act since 1995, and in 50% of those cases an environmental assessment was also triggered. In one of those cases, the federal government assessment disagreed with the province. This is a very ludicrous and wasteful situation. As parliamentarians, you have an opportunity to fix it.
It isn't only proponents who are protesting. In a submission to the same CEAA review, Jamie Kneen from MiningWatch Canada called the current system a “dog's breakfast”. He said, “This makes the public and the community groups ask why they should bother and why they should go back to this if the process is going to be that inconsistent”.
This is a point I often make in speeches that I give to the chamber network. Opponents to projects are very often community groups with limited funding. They are often using volunteers. Long, drawn-out proposal assessments are not in their interest either.
In addition to the incompetence of the administration of the act, there's the uncertainty. Toby Heaps at Corporate Knights wrote in February that:
There are several barriers to building a clean energy pan-Canadian highway with multiple north-south chutes, but the biggest one is red tape. New grid roll-outs are so bogged down in red tape that the timescales would test the patience of the pharaohs who used to build pyramids – whoever starts a project is unlikely to be alive by the time it comes to fruition.
This is not a situation that we can live with as a country. The implications of inefficiencies spread out in all directions.
I'm sure everybody here is conscious that oil and gas represents 27% of the capitalization of our stock market and that more than 40% of the issues on the stock market are mining stocks. There are an awful lot of people who don't care whatsoever about those industries, but whose personal wealth is nonetheless deeply leveraged against our success. They may not know that their public pensions, their private pensions, and their retirement plans are being supported by the success of the natural resources industries, but you know it here in Parliament.
I saw that you also heard testimony this week from the American Federation of Labor. Chris Smillie was here. He talked about how uncertainty rolls back into training and into worker preparation. At the chamber, we're running a major skills project this year. We constantly hear from the community colleges about uncertainty. They cannot offer training programs until they know that there's a reasonable chance their students will be employed. So they wait, and they wait, and they wait, and while they're waiting, generations of students come through, take a look, see what's offered, choose other careers, and move off. It's a very unfortunate situation, and one that Canada cannot actually sustain for very much longer because of the need that we have for workers.
Tens of thousands of businesses in our membership share that same story of uncertainty damaging their prospects, suppliers, engineers, transporters, and builders. None of them are calling for weak regulation; all of them are calling for better regulation.
Thank you very much.