Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Kind of going off of what my colleague Mr. Schmale had talked about, once you give that kind of authority to the minister, especially a radical minister....
I'll give you an example. We dealt with caribou closures in my riding. It's related to what we're talking about with protection zones not being defined. The then premier, an NDP premier, was supposed to consult with local individuals in the northeastern part of British Columbia. There were vast consultations done. There were a lot of conversations. There were community meetings. There was feedback.
Can we guess how many recommendations the premier took from those meetings? It was zero.
We had a radical minister go ahead and implement all these closures. One minister's decision affects us even today on moose closures, industrial development and all kinds of implications.
Not defining it in this piece of legislation, as I said last night, really puts this whole bill.... It's going to land in the courts and it's going to be there for a while because we're not defining these kinds of important things. You can bet the provinces will challenge it. We've had first nations testify at our committee that they will be challenging it. If we don't define it clearly, it puts a big bull's eye on this bill to be attacked on multiple fronts.
I understand what the Liberals across the way are trying to do. Again, they had nine years to get water done. It's still not done. This is kind of an excuse: “Hey, guys, this is our excuse. This is in the way of getting water done.”
It was supposed to be done in 2021. Really, they could have gotten it done regardless of this particular bill.
I'll just leave that out there. Thank you.