Environment committee  Good morning, Madam Chair. I want to thank the committee for the invitation. It is an honour for me to testify on behalf of the Quebec Environment Law Centre, the QELC. This bill will apply to an enormous territory and three oceans. This is an extremely important moment in our

Environment committee  There is a 10-page version but I guess it hasn't been translated yet.

Environment committee  On April 6.

Environment committee  Perhaps I could just make one last point. We support the amendment proposed by Louis-Gilles Francoeur which consists in translating the word “sustainability” by “viabilité” rather than “durabilité”. That is the last point I wanted to raise, for my francophone colleagues.

Environment committee  Yes. To the extent the agency would act as a secretariat to the commission in all contexts, maybe you could add as a purpose of the agency significant, meaningful public participation. A definition could be helpful also, as well as insisting on public hearings, not just submitti

Environment committee  Some of these limits were addressed in the modernization of the Quebec Environment Quality Act. I would draw a parallel with the preamble of Bill C-69 which indicates that the public will now be consulted on the content of the impact study guideline, at the very beginning of the

Environment committee  I mean all projects once we have certain criteria to define them, not every single action going on in Canada. That's physically impossible. Yes, I think every single project that has the potential to have an impact on an area of federal jurisdiction should be assessed. I think St

Environment committee  —according to the Constitution, and the jurisdiction arises when you make conditions for approval, not when you assess.

Environment committee  As I said, it's that their jobs will be to regulate their projects. If they want to have a job, there need to be projects going forward, so that's pretty much an institutional bias in favour of approving projects. From the bad experience in Quebec, we think generalists are better

Environment committee  I would like to say that the amendment we propose aims to clarify the fact that the rights of the province and indigenous jurisdictions must be respected or at least taken into consideration when the federal government makes a decision. The point, more specifically, is to avoid s

Environment committee  In fact, he suggested we use the word “viabilité” rather than “durabilité”. I don't think I could do justice to his eloquence since he is after all a journalist and an author. In short, the French word “durabilité” is ugly, it doesn't sound right and it gives the impression that

Environment committee  I'll be real quick. One other thing having that amendment on respect for provincial law would do is stop the arguments about the frustration of purpose of federal law. There's a court of appeal. There's a court being heard in Quebec where basically the previous government, who s

Natural Resources committee  I'm sorry I couldn't prepare a specific submission for my presentation today, but I'll basically be presenting some highlights of a collaborative and multidisciplinary research project on how to translate our international climate commitments into guidance for how we assess proje

Natural Resources committee  Okay. Very quickly—maybe we can go deeper in question time—the social costs of carbon is a way of trying to assess the damage associated with the emission of one tonne of carbon into the future for that specific year, and then discount it back to a present value today so that w

Natural Resources committee  Actually, I'll stop here and expand in the questions if someone is interested in this.