Mr. Speaker, first of all I would like to thank my colleague for her very pertinent remarks concerning Bill C-56. As she said in her speech and as I said in mine, the House is now aware of the reasons why we do not support this bill. I think that the arguments she so eloquently put forward and the ones I tried to present to the House myself explain why we have to oppose this bill.
We agree that the federal government used to be able to intervene and conduct an environmental assessment on federally owned land in an area under provincial jurisdiction. For example, right now, in my riding, the Department of National Defence is clearing an army mine field. It laid the mines in the first place. In this instance, we cannot ask Quebec to allocate funds to clean up a mess for which the Department of National Defence is responsible.
We are asking the federal government to honour its commitments on federally owned land. But we are being told in this bill that the federal government will be able to assess projects if it made any kind of investment, issued a licence, or had anything at all to do with them. In other words, the federal government will be able to subject any projects proposed by a province to an environmental assessment. We believe that this bill will lead to countless legal disputes and that is why we cannot support it.
I thank the member for Laurentides for her comments which are in total agreement with what I said earlier.