Mr. Speaker, maybe I was not at the same meeting but I did have a meeting with the member in the anteroom which is as good a meeting room as any. In that particular room I said the panel was struck.
The fact is that if the EARP guidelines had been met in the past there is no forum to strike a second panel. A proper panel was not struck in the past and it has not been subject to environmental review. The review panel has now been struck. In very short order the membership will be published and the hearings will begin.
I think the member for Wild Rose will also admit that in talking about the issue in question which is a major ski development, the developer not being able to receive proper environmental approvals for the whole project, basically cut the project in half and tried to get approval for the parking lot separate from the lifts. We think it has to be looked upon as an integrated package.
We have called for a panel to be struck and the panel will have to do its job. Obviously it has to be done in the context of the environmental implications. We would be remiss if we basically said that this particular person has invested a significant amount
of money and therefore it has to go ahead without any consideration of the environmental implications.
The hon. member will recognize that if the environmental concerns had been met obviously we would have no authority to strike an EARP panel. The fact one is being struck is because there has not been a proper environmental assessment.
We are doing what we have done in the past. We did it most recently with the federal-Saskatchewan panel on uranium mining. We are doing it with BAPE wherever possible. We are trying to facilitate the process where federal and provincial interests intersect. We are trying to run joint panels to make sure we do not put the developer and interested parties through the same process twice.
That has certainly been the practice I have established and want to continue. From that perspective we only want one stop shopping for environmental hearings. We do not want to put a project through a provincial hearing and then a federal hearing and have a number of hearings.
That being said we certainly are not about to give up our right to require an environmental assessment on an issue as significant as a major ski development in our national Rockies. The member points out that this is on the parking lot but the parking lot is going to be there for something. If the parking lot is being built to park cars, obviously there has to be a ski hill to go along with it.