Clearly, federal, provincial, and municipal governments all have a role to play in terms of regulating and permitting wind energy projects. A recent project in Ontario calculated that it required 77 different permits in order to proceed.
There is a problem in the number of permits, but the other issue is that because of the structure of our federation, we have a situation where we have different sets of rules in different jurisdictions and different sets of rules across municipalities within a jurisdiction, leading to duplication of effort and increased costs going forward.
One thing we think the federal government could do that would be very useful is to parallel something that we've seen in the United States. In the United States the Department of Energy funds something called the National Wind Coordinating Committee, which brings together the wind energy industry, state governments, the federal government, municipal governments, and other stakeholders. They sit down together and ask, “What are the key issues where we're running into trouble? Where is treatment most inconsistent? What are the key areas of research that we need?” They agree on a joint research program that goes forward.
The idea is not to develop out of that exercise a national standard that gets imposed on everybody; the idea is to develop a common knowledge base from which everybody can develop their own standards. The assumption is that, first off, if you do it that way, then not everybody has to do it and you don't have to waste a lot of resources, with every jurisdiction trying to figure out the same problem. Secondly, you develop your responses based on a common set of information, which should at least ensure that there's more similarity in the responses taken than might be the case if everybody were sitting in their own black box and trying to do it.
In the U.S., that exercise is funded by the Department of Energy to the tune of, I believe, $5 million a year.