Sure. I should put it in some perspective.
We're used to being the number one jurisdiction, so maybe our standard is high. Our chief competitor for a lot of the mining commodities is Australia, and that's who we're losing ground to. We're still competitive with the United States or Mexico or Chile. We expect to be, as a matter of course, but with Australia, we have to work hard at it. They're a federal state like us, so they have state level and federal level, but their federal environmental assessment system is more selective. It's not all mining projects. They intervene more selectively than we do, and it is better coordinated. They have provided much more support for infrastructure building, particularly during the last super cycle, than we did. They've done a number of things. They've even, most recently, appropriated our flow-through share system, which gave us a competitive advantage; now they have it, so we've lost that advantage.
They've been doing a number of things over the last 10 to 15 years that have outstripped us, and I think that's the cause for concern.
With our regulatory system, I touched on the issue of cumulative effects, but what the CEAA has done is impose timelines. We like timelines. We're not arguing against timelines, but it has become so rigid that coordinating with provincial environmental assessments—and we're always subject to both—has become more difficult.
We need somehow for the act to still have the rigour of timelines but to include some flexibility to work with the provincial governments. What I think was overlooked when these changes were made is that for the mining industry, it's not just the federal EA that matters: it's the whole thing. It's the provincial EA, the federal EA, the provincial and federal permit process, and how long that takes. We're in a situation now in which federal permits can take longer than the environmental assessment. It's after the environmental assessment. You're looking at maybe a two-year EA, but then a three-year permitting process. Our timelines are getting really long and much more uncertain, and there has to be a better way to do this.