Yes, I have some comments, and I'll start with the round table recommendation.
It was for an arm's-length position that had an advisory body of industry and NGOs to it, but you have to understand that function was placed within the context of fact-finding, and it had a mediative process, where it tried to bring people and find ways to move forward and make progress and bring companies into compliance--and for the sake of argument over detail, let's just say IFC standard is the primary body of that--and in its findings it would work with the company and other parties to identify gaps in areas for performance improvement. Companies would be given additional time to bring their processes to meet those requirements. There would be another review 12 months down the road, and the company would report on its progress. It may not have all the elements in place, but if it was getting close, then it would be given more time. Only at the end, if you had companies and no progress was being made, if you had companies that just simply did not wish to make progress or address these realities, then, yes, there were consequences. But it was a very balanced process.
Now, the ombudsman's office or the complaints office administration within the IFC standards looks at it from their process. The IFC standards are written, very generally, to be applied in a hundred different countries, and the environmental aspects are to be applied in everything from desert conditions, water shortage, to tropical rainforest situations. So they have a level of generality, and when you take them to the concept of a regulatory requirement, black and white, CSR, Bill C-300, you're either in full compliance or you're not, trivial or otherwise, and that's a very difficult process to do.
I don't think the bill recognizes just how difficult this is going to be to turn this into a quasi-regulatory requirement, which is why we really wanted to bring that process of working together with companies to get the performance in place.
In regard to the current counsellor position, yes, the government didn't respond, obviously, in its entirety. But even the Mining Association of Canada—take away the fact that I was part of the advisory group and I put my name on the report—when it supported the round table report did note this, because there was the offer and recognition within the round table report that clearly the parties would have to get together in some ongoing dialogue to work out the details of how that office would function, and the devil is in the details, as to whether it's balanced and is perceived to be fair by all parties and the access is appropriate, etc.
Again, that had a process to make sure the details would work out and appropriately recognize the concerns of all parties. In our view, this process in Bill C-300 did not have that type of engagement.