To add to that, the enhancement of the regulatory processes is positive, but once again, you're getting into a single issue, which is the environment.
When you have an indigenous community member or indigenous first nations leadership looking at the issue of say a pipeline coming through their community, there is the thought about pipelines contaminating water, using up water. There is talk about how it's going to influence medicinal plant growth. Then there's also the economic development and jobs. There are also the thought that, if we are unhealthy, even if we have jobs, what's the point?
What you often get—and I'll say this in particular with the environmental lobbies—is environmentalists being very effective at appropriating the voice of indigenous nations. They come into indigenous nations, and they strengthen the decision-making processes and the feeling of the nations toward their treaty rights to land and resource development.
I'll say firmly, if environmentalists were strictly the only ones opposing resource development in Canada, we would have a pipeline built by now. The reason why we don't have these resource development projects moving forward is because of the very real licence that indigenous peoples have to give to research development projects going through their territories.
How far that goes is up for debate and that's evolving within the law. When we talk about the environment, however, we have to separate the needs of the indigenous community from the needs of environmentalists or any other single-issue lobby group.
With the regulatory process, it is positive, but if all it does is respond to the single issue of the environment, it will not be successful.