Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, guests, for coming here and providing these presentations. I found it quite informative and helpful.
I've been on record asking questions about this kind of stuff for a very long time, when it comes to the timelines, and I'm horrified again to hear that some of these permits and so on seem to be taking so long.
As somebody who represents municipalities that recently went through the construction process through our economic action plan, I was horrified to learn that project funding would be on hold until environmental impact assessments were being completed. Because those were time-sensitive funding packages, somebody could simply miss getting several million dollars of project funding because somebody doing the environmental impact assessment had no motivation, no incentive, no framework whatsoever to get that file off their desk. If it wasn't for a member of Parliament trying to light a fire—it doesn't matter what member of Parliament happened to represent that municipality—it didn't seem to get done.
Now, I'm not trying to put myself out of work here, because I appreciate people knocking on my door and asking for my assistance, but the reality is we shouldn't have to go through this kind of a process. So to start things off, my question is what has Saskatchewan done recently? Have they changed things? I believe the example I was given was 13 months to get something taken care of in Saskatchewan, versus the horror stories that we're hearing of four years to five years to get through the permitting process.
That's going to be my first question. Can you tell me...? I think you mentioned Quebec was doing something well on that front as well.