Madam Speaker, I am a biologist, and in a former life I used to write environmental impact assessments and review them.
Over many years of doing that work I have discovered that rarely do environmental assessments stop projects, rather they improve them. Environmental assessment is one more tool, a useful, necessary, and in this case, essential tool to help us to do better planning, better building, better construction, and to assess the likely impacts upon the environment—in this case, upon our streams—by proposed projects.
Environmental assessment is just one more kind of good planning. I am sure everyone in this House supports good planning. We should not be reducing environmental assessments in these days; we should be ensuring, particularly in our waterways, that environmental assessments occur.