I would absolutely agree with my colleague. As part of the national trade corridors funding project, in which we're building a new port capable and ready for short-sea containers, we have been through three years of regulatory approval processes with Parks Canada, Fisheries, navigation, environmental assessment and impact assessment. It has been three years, and we don't even have a shovel in the ground. We may not get one in the ground until 2027, because we're simply running out of building time during the season. It will be four years from approval to construction. We need to collapse the time.
As my colleague said, it's not just the legitimate requirements to prove we are not harming the environment and what benefits we're contributing. It's the duplication of requirements. It continues to confound me that each department and regulatory process we go through wants unique and separate indigenous consultations. Two of them each wanted distinct and separate impacts on fish species and water flow. We had one requirement to prove that infilling an inlet of about 60 feet across and maybe 150 metres long would not affect the Great Lakes levels by emptying them out. These things are just ludicrous.
My suggestion to the committee would be that we need to give departmental officials an opportunity to use common sense and to have thresholds for which they can make calls at the field level without having to tick every box on the sheet.