It is 2014, I know, Mr. Speaker. There is no point any more.
We come out, and what is on the docket for us to study? Terrestrial conservation. Do we not wish we were on environment committee? Talk about demoralizing. I think there are good reasons to talk about terrestrial conservation, but there are so many other issues, and we have already done two studies on conservation. Now we are doing terrestrial conservation, and that is what this report is, for which I moved concurrence today.
Why terrestrial conservation? Why not marine conservation? We would not want to study marine conservation because then we would have to talk about fish habitat. This is a way of excluding the important legislation that government gutted back in 2012. The House will remember there was a budget announcement in 2012 and then there were two bills after that in 2012. Those two bills, both of which passed, were remarkable in many ways. They were omnibus pieces of legislation. The first one touched over 70 pieces of legislation: it amended or repealed in some way or added to 70 pieces of legislation, all wrapped up in one bill that was over 400 pages long. Then we had a second one in the fall. This is really significant.
It is a little hobby horse of mine that the first bill, a budget bill, made changes to assisted human reproduction. Whether or not I can be a surrogate, whether or not I can sell my eggs was in a budget bill. My reproduction has nothing to do with the budget.
We have these giant omnibus bills. What happened on environment? A number of things. The Environmental Assessment Act was repealed. It was not tweaked or amended, it was pulled off the books and replaced with another one. What are the problems with it? For example, we have had what is called a trigger system with environment assessment. If a project touched a federal issue, such as migratory birds or waterways that crossed provincial boundaries, it would trigger an environmental assessment.
That makes sense. We can wrap our head around why it would be that way. However, now we have a list of things that mean environmental assessment. If something is not on the list, there is no environmental assessment.
Why is that problematic? Members should think about the oil sands. If we had had a definitive list 70 years ago, oil sands exploration would not have been on that list because we would not have known it was in the realm of the possible. We would not have considered that we should put oil sands development on the list. A trigger is important, because it is the situation that causes the assessment, not this definitive list. The other thing about the list is that it is cabinet that makes up the list. It is trouble, because the list is narrow. Seismic testing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is not on that list. I think that is pretty problematic. We have moved from the trigger to the list.
We also had the environment commissioner testify at committee about this list. There used to be three stages of environmental assessment. The lowest stage was like a paper stage, where one would submit documents and get feedback on them, but it was still effective. Forgive me if I get the numbers a little bit wrong because I am tapping into my memory. We asked the environment commissioner how many environmental assessments were being done. My memory says he said 4,000 to 6,000 per year. My next question was how many will be done now that the Environmental Assessment Act has been replaced in this regime. He said 10 to 12. I actually thought he meant 10,000 to 12,000, but he said it was just 10 to 12 for the country. These are incredible changes to our environmental assessment regime. It practically does not exist anymore.
There are also all of the changes to consultation, where people now have to be directly affected. What does “directly affected” mean? If I live 10 kilometres downstream, am I directly affected? If I live 100 kilometres downstream, am I directly affected? If I am a scientist living in Vancouver who has expertise about the Douglas Channel, am I directly affected? There is no definition of this, and it completely curtails who can testify and be a party to these hearings.
In addition to the changes to the Environmental Assessment Act in 2012, there were changes to the Fisheries Act. The Fisheries Act was one of the strongest pieces of environmental legislation that we had here in Canada, because it talked about the protection of fish habitats. If we are going to protect our fish and our fisheries, we have to protect our fish habitat. That makes sense.
In 2012, the protection of fish habitat was taken out of the legislation. What does that mean?