Mr. Speaker, the bill is but one part of the government's overall approach to regulatory reform.
Over the past year we have been actively reviewing some 40,000 pages of regulations and moving to change hundreds of the most obsolete and problematic regulations in the next year. No longer will trains have to have spittoons, for example.
As well, we will be bringing in changes shortly to the Statutory Instruments Act that will create a more efficient and less time consuming way of developing and changing regulations. That is the second part of our plan for regulatory reform.
Bill C-62 is a third part of our program. What we are trying to do here is to create a tool for use in special circumstances only, where an individual or a company feels it can achieve the goals of regulation but wants to do so in a manner that is not exactly as laid out in a particular set of technical regulations.
We have carefully and painstakingly crafted these tools to make sure they do their job without reducing the protection that environmental or other regulations give the Canadian public. I would like to point out that the bill is one of the first pieces of process legislation ever tabled in the House of Commons that enshrines as an inviolate and absolute principle the goal of sustainable development.
It is the environmental movement, I point out, that has been at the forefront in recent years in urging governments to include sustainable development as a legislative principle. The act we are talking about explicitly does this. It says that no agreements can be approved under the act in any area whatsoever, unless it is considered with the goals of sustainable development, period.
The measures proposed in this bill are optional.
If the Minister of the Environment does not want to use them with respect to any set of regulations, she does not have to do anything, thereby effectively exempting those regulations from the application of the bill.
The bill is truly a democratic innovation. It will allow individuals, whether farmers, union members, taxpayers or even politicians, to force the government to examine its own regulations. From a common sense point of view it will force departments to look closely at possibly rigid, inflexible and often outdated rules to see if there is a better, cheaper and more sensible way to do things.