Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Minister, and thank you to the parliamentary secretary and our esteemed officials for being here and answering our questions.
Minister, I'd like to start off with a few questions on the Fisheries Act, specifically section 35. Your party campaigned, as did ours, to restore the environmental protections immediately in your new term, specifically to restore the protections in section 35 of the Fisheries Act within...I'd take that to be within 100 days. That's what I think is “immediate”. Obviously, that might be open to discretion.
Since the election, there have been 35 organizations, national environmental organizations, as well as individuals and first nations, that have written to the minister stating their concern. They want to reverse the changes that were made in 2012 under the Harper regime and that essentially gutted the Fisheries Act. There has been a petition from West Coast Environmental Law, with 10,000 signatures, essentially calling for that.
The government has been in office for over a year, and still we have the 2012, essentially gutted Fisheries Act in place. We've had a review of the Site C dam go through under that. We will see the Kinder Morgan application go through under that same regime. Now that we're involved in a consultation that is going to take us into next year, how do you see restoring the Fisheries Act, and specifically the HADD, as being “immediately”?