Mr. Speaker, we hear the term social licence from a few different places. I want to pick up on that a bit, because the challenge with a term like social licence is that it can always be a moving target. We might say one needs to obtain social licence, yet that seems to be an excuse that is continually used to push the discussion further without ever actually coming to a definitive conclusion.
Any process needs to have a mechanism in place for evaluating the evidence, for weighing the feedback, and ultimately, for making a decision. We hear New Democratic and Liberal politicians, here and in Alberta as well, say that they just have to wait until they get social licence. However, in effect, what that leads to is projects being killed.
If the member is so convinced of the importance of social licence, which to me seems an ethereal concept, I wonder if he could actually define it. I wonder if he could actually tell me what achieving social licence on a project would look like. Clearly, it is not unanimity, because we are never going to have unanimity on any policy, no matter how demonstrably beneficial it is. What would achieving social licence, and therefore getting to a yes, actually look like, in the member's view?