I appreciate that, Ms. Tully, but I for one on this committee have been wrestling with the various departments whose interest must be triggered before any applications are brought forward. That's why I gave you the numbers about the ones that are carried forward from year to year: 2,000-plus are dealt with every year, and an additional 2,000 plus are not. That tells me the delay is much more than 30 days.
The reason we have these figures is that the committee demanded from the department a collection of all the delays or any of the applications that were being held up and the rationale for them being held up, so we could deal with a problem that was real rather than one that was perceived.
At least four departments federally must be engaged whenever there is a serious question, and none of them is necessarily triggered by the other one. They can be triggered independently, and their respective provincial departments do the same. I think Monsieur Laframboise gave you an indication earlier on about the frustration at provincial levels about how all of the departments that are activist--so activist departments--in the maintenance of the environment are all engaged in the process. Unless I've read them all wrong, they have asked this committee to come up with a mechanism for not necessarily discarding issues so we can move forward, but to see if we can collect all the precedents that come forward that are constantly repeated one after the other, so from an administrative perspective we could both safeguard environmental issues, or, to use the most egregious one, the Petitcodiac River causeway and all the others that really don't fit into that category.
I don't know whether I'm making myself clear, Ms. Tully. I'm asking whether the philosophy and ideology of social development and economic development that may have prevailed or been non-existent 30, 40, 50, or 60 years ago and as prevalent today can go hand in hand with the immediate needs that others have come forward and identified from the institutionalized grassroots philosophical positions you've outlined.
Were you ever consulted by them?