Environment committee  All right. I'll do my best. Thank you very much to the committee for the invitation to appear before you today. I hope my appearance will be of assistance to you in your study of this important piece of legislation. By way of a brief introduction, I've been a lawyer for 27 year

Environment committee  Well, since I've been espousing efficiency, I'll leave it at that.

Environment committee  Well, I'll stand to be corrected on when CEAA was enacted, but I believe it was 1993. I've been involved in the development of projects involving federal environmental assessments since the get-go. Indeed, I was involved in the EARPGO process before then, so that dates me to abou

Environment committee  Hundreds.

Environment committee  Well, as I indicated, I tend to get involved in the larger projects, but sometimes the proponents can actually be small. You could have a small mining company, for example, that's been trying to develop a project for several years, all the way up to a large mining company that ha

Environment committee  That's a big issue with regard to some resource extraction industries, but for other industries perhaps not as much. Market timing is a key issue. You always run up against this with regard to investments in those industries. People say they have a window where the market is at

Environment committee  Very frequently.

Environment committee  I would refer to the word “frequently”.

Environment committee  Well, lawyers always like certainty, because clients like certainty.

Environment committee  It's a very uncertain process in CEAA. For example, Mr. Hazell referred to this RA concept. I know the major projects management office is doing the best they can on this, but for a long time you'd have RAs fighting over which one was going to take the lead. You'd start to guess.

Environment committee  No. We're paid to actually give our best opinion. So you end up, for example, with an RA with a minor role in a project getting involved in debates as to whether they will have a more significant role. Those are the types of process examples that I pull my hair out trying to

Environment committee  I'm sorry. Can you rephrase the question?

Environment committee  Yes, there is. I think the initial screening process was designed to deal with that back when CEAA was originally developed. Of course, when you have a trigger under the environmental assessment.... For example, if a bridge, a minor stream crossing, necessitates a subsection 35(1

Environment committee  I'll just repeat what I said earlier. I would be in favour of the somewhat radical idea of doing away with this whole law list trigger concept and going to defined, prescribed regulations that have thresholds on size and impact on the environment, but I realize that's probably ou

Environment committee  Well, for years I've heard the discussion about strategic environmental assessments. The Ontario class environmental assessment was, in many respects, almost a strategic environmental assessment. It dragged on for six years. I'm very concerned about the use of the environmental