Thank you, Chair.
I'm pleased to have an opportunity to speak to Minister O'Regan this morning.
Thank you for joining us.
I share with you, of course, the memories of the Ocean Ranger tragedy and the Cougar helicopter tragedy. I attended the hearings of both of those inquiries. In fact, I had standing at the offshore helicopter inquiry run by Justice Wells. I know how important offshore safety is to everybody, but only in 2014 did we have enforceable regulations for safety in the offshore in the same way they occurred on land, so it's very important that they be in place.
I understand that they're complicated, and it takes time to get these put in place, even though 300 pages is not really a lot for regulations. Nevertheless, what galls me and I think many people is the fact that this regime was allowed to lapse on December 31 of last year. The regulations since then are unenforceable in the same sense that they were. That's spelled out in the legislation itself. No one can be convicted of an offence under the regulations if it occurred between January 1 of this year and whenever this law is put into place. By the way, we want to put them in place as quickly as possible, and we support that.
Can the minister explain how it is that these offshore safety regulations were allowed to lapse in the Newfoundland and Labrador offshore? It wouldn't happen to any other regulations. Is this a case of someone being asleep at the switch or not realizing the importance of these regulations in the Newfoundland and Labrador offshore?