Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to rise tonight in adjournment proceedings to pursue a question that I originally asked on March 24. It pertains to something that is fundamental to the concept that Canada has any framework of environmental law, any regimen of review in advance before large projects proceed.
In a strange quirk of history, I was actually in the office of the Minister of the Environment in the Mulroney administration when I shepherded through the Privy Council Office permission to legislate the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. It finally passed into law. It was passed under the Mulroney administration, received royal assent under the administration of the Right Hon. Jean Chrétien, and it has evolved since then.
It had as its cornerstone principles that the environmental assessment process must engage Canadians. Public participation and rights of public participation were fundamental to that act. So, too, was a broad understanding of what environment means, including the full environment, marine, terrestrial, all aspects of the environment, human health and the environment, even socio-economic impacts, and even local community values.
That environmental assessment process required that alternatives be reviewed. A project was not just approved; the question was actually asked as to whether there was a better way to do something which would cause less environmental damage.
All of that was destroyed. It was destroyed completely in omnibus budget Bill C-38 in spring 2012. Those of us in the opposition parties fought it as hard as we could. Liberals, New Democrats, Greens, and the Bloc, we tried to protect the cornerstone of environmental law, and we lost because might makes right and the Conservative government at the time forced through the acceptance of something called the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012.
It is not an environmental assessment act at all. It fails even in comparison to environmental assessments conducted by developing countries. It is a joke of an environmental assessment act. To make it worse, it took away the fundamental principle of public participation. That was a fundamental principle of our cornerstone of our environmental assessment law, and it is gone. The new CEAA 2012 says that only those parties who are directly affected, such as if one lives next door to a large quarry, next door to a large LNG facility, have a right to participate.
It took away the heart and soul and rigour of environmental assessment law. Worse than that, in the case of energy projects, it made up a whole new regime. It said that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 does not apply through its normal agency operations if it is a pipeline, a nuclear facility, or an offshore oil and gas facility. In those cases, the National Energy Board for the first time in Canadian history was mandated to do environmental assessments. So, too, were the offshore petroleum boards for Newfoundland and Labrador, for Nova Scotia, as was the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. They were given the authority to do environmental assessments.
Now, we have lived through quite a few of these. I can say without a shadow of a doubt and without fear of contradiction from any person in the public interest or environmentalist who has gone through that process, they are a sham.
Here we are, it is June 1, 2016, and I ask the government opposite, why are we still operating under Bill C-38's destruction of our environmental law? I ask, as I did on March 24, when can we see the end of Bill C-38 and bring back real environmental assessment in Canada?