Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Yukon for the presentation of Bill C-17. Coming from the second-prettiest riding in Canada, it is good that there is some inspired legislation coming forward.
I have a question for my friend about this notion of time limits. In my riding of Skeena, an idea was brought forward, not only by the Harper Conservatives, but also by the B.C. provincial Liberals, that if these time limits were brought in that forced regulatory decisions, it would make for greater certainty for companies and investors in particular. However, New Democrats noticed that the effect was in fact the opposite, particularly for the 48 or 49 first nations communities that I represent in my riding. When the time limit was brought in, oftentimes there were one or two full-time staffers working on seven or eight major mining proposals, three or four gas line proposals; there were warehouses full of scientific documentation.
The first nations would go to the federal government for support to try to get through the review and gain an understanding so that they could present it back to the first nations with some coherence, and they would get a $5,000 or $8,000 grant from the federal government to review nine mines. Each mining application could be 8,000 pages, 9,000 pages each.
My question for my friend is this. Imposing time limits without the resources to be able to comprehend the specificity of the project and the impact it might have for decades and decades to come seems to be a square peg in a round hole. Is that not something that would have been better off fixed?