Mr. Speaker, on March 9, 2010, I asked the government why it was handing over even more environmental responsibilities from agencies legally mandated to protect the environment to agencies mandated to promote industrial development. In other words, why is the government putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse?
The recent budget clearly reveals the government's agenda to diminish the federal role in environmental assessments and regulatory controls over major projects when it declared its intent to “modernize the regulatory process”.
The first step by the government was creating the MPMO within the natural resources department. Despite several decades of a very effective role by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency in coordinating environmental assessments and providing information on environmental review processes, the government in its wisdom established another agency to do precisely that role, but more from the perspective of pro the project. That was the first step.
The second step was in last year's budget where the government took a piece of the responsibility for federal environmental assessment under the Navigable Waters Protection Act and, instead of coming to an open public review to the House through the budget, did away with that responsibility for environmental impact assessment.
This time around, in the budget, the government is removing Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency oversight over nuclear and major energy projects, shifting coordination of those projects to the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
In this year's budget, the government took an even greater broad brush exempting all of its infrastructure projects, recreation projects, projects on first nations lands, energy retrofits and rural infrastructure.
Absurdly, the Minister of the Environment may actually exempt a project that is exempted from federal assessment if that project may cause significant adverse environmental effects. But of course we can never figure that out because the government has already exempted the projects from environmental impact assessments.
Who has recommended this? When I asked the question, the reply from the minister was that a number of people have recommended these massive reforms to diminish the federal role in environmental impact assessments and to transfer that role from a long-standing federal environmental assessment agency, which has had a very magnanimous role, a very important role in co-operating with provincial governments and making sure that they were coordinated, to other agencies.
The minister responded that the commissioner for sustainable development, in his 2009 audit report, recommended this very change. His report, however, makes no such recommendation. He does concur that there could be more timely delivery and a screening of projects and so forth, and he recommends, as does the agency itself, that these matters ought to be reviewed by the parliamentary committee in their statutory required review which is coming up in several months.
The question that I would have again to the government is, why is it superceding the very review processes that are set out in federal law for the parliamentary committee to review changes to federal assessments, including law and policy, and instead doing it through a budget bill where there is very diminished opportunity for public input and comment?