Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I wasn't in the committee for all the hearings on this bill. I was just in on the last one. In some of my questioning of one of the witnesses in that last meeting, I was trying to ascertain that as a company that was in the mining business, they were already highly regulated and their regulator already requires a certain amount of extensive consultation when they do their work. In addition, as a mining company, they were expanding that beyond just what was required by law.
I think from a philosophical basis on our side, the idea that we would impose a duplicate consultation process on a company or an entity when other laws and other requirements, whether they're provincial regulations or national regulators, are already covering it and require them to make those.
In some instances, companies aren't regulated, so the intent of this amendment is to say that this process is okay if they aren't already covered by some other regulatory process that requires them to do this consultation anyway. It's trying to avoid the duplication of two efforts and the prolonging of costs and time to get projects passed when really it's not needed in certain circumstances.