Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Yukon came to committee to raise precisely those issues.
We approached the bill in a serious fashion. We said from the very outset that we wanted to support the principles of the bill, which is a logical extension and conclusion of initiatives that began in 1970 and then proceeded in 1982 under a Liberal government led by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. We felt that this was the way to go but we all wanted to have answers about the environment. It was not the what to do about the environment but the how to do it. How would the environment be protected? What measures would the Government of Canada take to illustrate that there would be a serious approach to ensure that any polluters would pay, or to use the words of the Minister of Transport, “polluter pays”?
We brought forward officials from the various departments to see how they were equipping themselves to take on this additional responsibility. Members heard what I said in my speech. They shrugged their shoulders and said that they did not know, that they did not have the mandate and that nobody knows what is going on.
That raised questions. Does the government have the competence to do what the bill demands it to do? Is the government exaggerating its own importance in doing what is the logical extension of previous legislation? On that, there is no doubt that the government exaggerates and demonstrates incompetence.