Madam Speaker, today the member has brought forward Bill C-339 dealing with intervenor funding.
In this country we have established independent quasi-judicial panels and agencies to make decisions about land use. This bill deals with intervenor funding in that land use process. For instance, if a large oil company wants to work on a pipeline that runs through miles and miles of farmland, the company must first make an application to the National Energy Board. The board will consider the effects of the pipeline on other people and on the environment before allowing the company to do the work.
This bill attempts to deal with a problem that occurs when a project has the capacity to hurt people or their assets. A large company can afford to hire all sorts of lawyers to make its case and minimize the effects of its agenda so the full truth may not come out at the hearings. The board members may make a decision based on incomplete information at the board hearings which is certainly detrimental to the public interest.
There is a policy interest here. I acknowledge this problem exists. Bill C-339 seeks to correct this imbalance by requiring a large company, such as an oil company, that brings an application before a quasi-judicial agency to pay for certain other groups to oppose its own application. This is one way to provide intervenor funding.
Provincial acts exist in several provincial jurisdictions, two of which are Ontario and Alberta. Ontario's act requires the company making the application to fund its opponent. The member mentioned this is the act that he modelled his private member's bill on.
I want to applaud the intentions of the member for Oxford in putting together this bill because the proposal arises out of a difficult experience of a number of his constituents. The bill speaks to a situation in the member's riding in May 1994 in which 130 farm families had to get together to oppose an application to the National Energy Board made by Interprovincial Pipe Line Inc. to convert pipelines running through their properties.
The farmers were able to fight the action but not before it had cost them $365,000 plus interest. To oppose the pipeline they had to form a coalition across a wide geographic area and put up a lot of personal cash to get the job done. In strict economic terms, without dealing with the human side of the equation, no intervenor funding was necessary in this case. The company that brought forward the application and another body, in this case a group of farmers, had the resources and were able to marshal them together to oppose the application.
In other words, because the farmers were able to put together the money and win the case, it proved no intervenor funding was required. However, strict economic theory would say that the greater the number of people the decision might affect, the greater the pool of money that would be available to oppose it. The number of people increases as more and more people realize the decision will negatively affect their interests. This would be the case if we were talking strict economic theory.
Unfortunately, the pure world of the economist is not the real world we must live in. Many of these applications do not get a lot of coverage in the news so the people that should be concerned do not hear about it until the problems confront them personally, sometimes years later.
A large company like an oil company also has the advantage of superior information. It has been around for a long time. It has had time to develop a lot of expertise and information to present to the panel. Most big companies also have a lot of money to finance research, pay a slew of lawyers to do their work and make slick presentations before boards. They can afford to drag out the hearings over a long period of time. All the advantages are in their ball park.
This subject is very appropriate but I also have questions about this bill. For instance, I question whether it is fair for a private company to be required to finance the very group that may kill its
application. This part of the bill would almost certainly be challenged in court by the companies that stand to suffer from it.
There is also an unfortunate, perhaps inadvertent, assumption made by the bill that all companies that appear before boards and agencies are large ones which can afford to fund their opponents. The bill makes no provision for the small business that has to get federal approval for some small development and would therefore find itself subject to all provisions of the bill.
For example, in my riding a very small outfit wanted to put together a silicate sand mine. It was called a mine but it was really a travel pit. It was a mine because it involved silicate sand. The company jumped through all the hoops and did all the things it could think of to receive provincial approvals, but then it was told that it had to go through the federal approvals because it was a mine. The people finally gave up. They said: "This will cost us another $100,000 and we cannot afford it".
Imagine if a neighbour was worried about sand blowing off the silicate sand pit and wanted intervenor funding. There would be only a couple of people involved but there was no way they could ever afford to pay for the intervenor status.
Clause 4(7) of the bill states that the level of intervenor funding would not be set according to the company's ability to pay, it would be set according to the going rates of the lawyers. That would be enough to kill some companies in a matter of hours.
My second major concern is the scope of the bill, which is very broad. It applies to any project on any land, public or private, that needs approval by any federal authority, including a board or agency, or even a civil servant, where the approval process requires or even permits public input. Can you think of any project of any size at all which is started today without a raft of federal government approvals? I cannot. If intervenor funding was available for all government approvals the program might quickly become unmanageable.
Finally, the bill tends to invite litigation from all manners of groups which would demand funding through the courts if rejected by the funding panel created by the bill. Indeed, the bill tends to create groups which might not otherwise exist because of the promise of either federal funding through court challenges or funding through the intervenor act. We know that the federal bureaucracy has in this way created a demand for its own services for decades and I am sure that some government departments would love the extra work.
These are difficult problems. While I agree with the member's intentions, I have not been able to think of a way to change the bill to minimize the abuses about which I have spoken. I fear that if the proponent funding measures did not fly, that is, if private companies successfully challenged the fairness of having to fund their own opponents, or if they were unable to provide the funding in some way, that government, as usual, would have to take up the slack. It would become a typical government cash cow, milked by many different interest groups with varying degrees of responsibility and various political agendas. As we know, this particular cow at the federal level is a dry cow and there will not be any milk in it for a long time to come.
As I said before, if the panel did not like the group's agenda and refused to support it, perhaps the courts, which have become very sympathetic with intervenor groups in recent years, might force them to do so.
I wonder if the problem could be addressed, at least in part, by having intervenor groups respond to the concerns of their particular constituencies by the government allowing them to have the equivalency of charitable status with Revenue Canada. Therefore, they could receive partial assistance from the federal government. This would require a measure of financial commitment and responsibility by the intervenors and it would not require any panels or acts of Parliament to make those decisions.
I am concerned that the intervenor funding act, if it develops as I fear, may make it very difficult for companies to push forward with new projects in Canada.
Recently we met with the mining companies during the "Keep Mining in Canada" week. They told us that it takes up to three years to get all the approvals from the provincial governments and then the federal government to do the initial environmental assessments and so on to start up a mine.
The industry minister has also mentioned the problems of overlapping of jurisdictions, provincial and federal, that make it very difficult for mines to open. The industry minister is attempting to bring together some co-ordination to reduce the red tape for companies. I fear that the intervenor act may add another level of problems for companies which are trying to create jobs, wealth and opportunity within Canada. Something which we do not need at this time is another layer of problems.
I would like to talk about the basic principle of the bill. We have recently put forward a 20-point proposal on how we can realign federal-provincial obligations in this country. The very first point in our 20-point proposal is that natural resources and the care of natural resources is constitutionally a provincial jurisdiction and whenever possible should be left in the provincial realm.
I mentioned earlier that two provinces already have addressed the problem in their own realm by allowing intervenor funding through provincial legislation. I believe it may be best to leave that natural resource issue with the provinces and allow the other
provinces to bring forward similar legislation to address it at the provincial level.
I recognize that the member for Oxford has brought to light an existing imbalance in the system. However, I am not convinced that the bill he has proposed would deal with the problem without creating new problems in itself. I would be pleased, however, to suggest to the Standing Committee on Natural Resources, on which I sit as a member, that the committee invite the member who has brought this bill forward and other witnesses and try to suggest ways of either altering, improving or finding ways to accomplish the purpose behind the bill.
While I would like to thank the member for his effort, I am hesitant to give my support for this bill for the reasons I have stated. I will be listening to the other speeches to see if I can approve it.