Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today for the third reading on Bill C-9, an act to amend the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act or CEAA. Although far from perfect, the Canadian Alliance will be supporting this legislation which is the result of a mandatory five year review of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act itself.
Because the five year review did not allow full inspection of the original act, the bill in many ways is incomplete. This is regrettable and will need to be addressed at the next mandatory review seven years from now.
One of the chief features of Bill C-9 is the creation of the Canadian environmental assessment registry. The registry will provide more public access to documents, surrounding a project through an online database. A coordinator position has been created to administer this registry and coordinate the process.
I am pleased with some of the positives achieved at committee with respect to Bill C-9. These include new scoping provisions that can begin before a project is approved. Providing details on the scope of the project will increase transparency and trust between groups that have traditionally clashed over environmental issues.
The creation of an online registry should also provide more and better information. The Canadian Alliance fought hard to ensure that those without Internet access could still obtain information they sought.
Most important though, the entire act will be reviewed in seven years by a parliamentary committee. It is crucial that the next review take the process out of the hands of cabinet, which prevented a number of sections of CEAA not to be opened for political reasons.
When I speak about this review, it was a ministerial review and they very tightly controlled which aspects of the act could be reviewed under the scoping provisions. Fortunately we were able to get an amendment through where the next review would be a parliamentary review. It will be up to the purview of the committee itself. It will be the master of that review and will decide what should be opened. I think that will be a much better review seven years from now.
However there were some flaws which we also identified in Bill C-9 and I would like to talk about those for a few minutes.
The minister said that one of the positives of this act was that CEAA would now extend to some 40 crown corporations. I do not believe that is quite accurate, maybe on the face of it, but I will explain it in more details because this is the exact provision that we fought for in committee.
We felt that crown corporations operating inside Canada should follow the same rules, the Canadian environmental assessment rules, as every other business or company or anybody who fell under this act. Of course they have been exempted.
The government once again exempted many crown corporations from coverage under CEAA. Crown corporations will be allowed three years to create separate regulations governing environmental assessment. Certainly there are crown corporations that need special circumstances but these agencies are relatively few in number. The government had five years to prepare a list in which agencies should be exempted yet this was never done. We have to ask the question.
Under the new legislation, and this is where the government has sort of compromised the crown corporations, crown corporations that want to be exempted under the act have three years to prepare their own environmental assessment process. If they do not, then they will be bound by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. We would have argued that they should not have even had that much latitude, that operating inside Canada they should still have been compelled the same as everybody else. However that is another question for another day and one which hopefully will be addressed when the review is done.
Another concern is that Bill C-9 allows too much authority to the minister to seek further consultation before he or she issues a decision statement. This provision is subject to abuse. When a project becomes politically sensitive, the minister could delay making a decision which to this side of the House represents an abuse of process. Again, while we are not suggesting it is, the potential is there for that to happen. We thought it would have been a much stronger bill if that loophole had been closed.
Another weak area is that the municipal land use authorities should have had equal input into the process as first nations bands. This amendment was defeated by the government. Municipal governments could be affected by federal projects near or in their jurisdictions. They should have an equal right to express these concerns within the assessment process. Sadly, they have been excluded. Again, we did not agree with that as well
Despite these concerns the Canadian Alliance recognizes that on balance these improvements would actually help the process and provide better clarity to what exists now in Bill C-9 and other areas. As steps toward a single window of approval process with meaningful penalties are being made, we should not refuse them. Between now and the next review of CEAA, we will have an opportunity to see how these changes will affect environmental assessment in Canada. At that time we can take the next step and improve upon the process.
Environmental protection and the needs of industry must be meshed and both viewpoints need to be considered in this process. Our support for Bill C-9 is not without reservation. We will be watching for the government to make CEAA work much more effectively in the future.