Mr. Speaker, I had the opportunity for a number of years to sit on the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board where we looked at projects and conducted public hearings on a variety of issues.
In the north, which is quite a colonial state still, the federal government took the recommendations we had and basically ignored them. Apart from that, it is really vital that the public interest in each province and in the territories in economics is understood by the population. The population has the ability, whether it is small business, aboriginal people, or whoever it is, to understand the kinds of decisions that we are making and how they impact on their lives. That is a fundamental aspect of the democratic system.
Interestingly enough, often when we do environmental assessments, we move into economics and find out some of the answers. Therefore, the public hearing process would have helped the government gain a backbone and it would have also helped Canadians.