Thanks, Mr. Chair, and I'll probably share that time.
If we go back to your review of environmental protection law regulations generally, we have to look at it in what the legal framework is right now. For most first nations, particularly under modern treaties, the environmental assessment rules and all those are already prescribed constitutionally. The first nation doesn't have the power to set about enacting its own environmental assessment system. So I'm a little puzzled about the suggestion that they might set about enacting their own environmental assessment and so forth.
Certainly even under the Indian Act, there are some limited rules for dealing with landfills and so forth, and that's been the frustration—that the act is so outdated that it doesn't give those full ambit. Under the land management code, there is some limited capacity, but whatever they enact, they can't override the constitutionally entrenched processes.
I frankly can't conceive of any first nation, even as advanced as they are—and there are a lot of them who are very advanced and have been able to bring back into their community, and keep in their community, lawyers, toxicologist, scientists, and managers and so forth. It's hard enough for a federal or provincial government to enact and cover all regulations needed to manage safe drinking water, source water, environmental impact assessment, and dangerous goods. I'm a little puzzled at your suggestion that they would even begin to be able to promulgate those rules on their own, even if they finalized their treaty, even if finally they received the dollars under that treaty. Is there not some other measure that's needed to fill that gap?
We're stuck in the middle, where with some success the federal government has said, “Yes, we support you moving to self-government”. At the same time, there is this big gap of catch-up, and they want to be able to have this regulatory framework because they're dealing with resource extraction and development opportunities on their lands...and most of them don't want to sign agreements with the province.
My understanding is that one of the options that the Indian Affairs expert panel suggested was under the proposed safe drinking water laws—the federal ones. The option is for a first nation to simply adopt by reference the provincial law. So in fact they're actually applying a federal law, but it's through the federal law.... My understanding is they're not actually going to embrace the provincial law. I don't think constitutionally that's even possible. I wonder if you could speak to that.