Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on the previous Minister of the Environment, now the hon. Leader of the Opposition, who stated in the House on April 5, 1990: "The federal government has very clear jurisdiction in the area of environmental impact assessment".
This jurisdiction is not challenged and it cannot be challenged. We have gone even further in the government. We have entrenched in law the principle of participant funding. In the last fiscal year there was about $860,000 available for the public to participate in the environmental assessment process enshrined by the previous Minister of the Environment.