Natural Resources committee  That was his way of--

Natural Resources committee  The title of the website is quite provocative, and there's a reason behind it, as I outlined in my testimony before you today.

Natural Resources committee  No, it's not quite how you paint it. What I've said here is that things are proceeding on such a rapid scale in British Columbia, with the handout of these leases so quickly without understanding what the cumulative environmental repercussions are--I'm just repeating myself.

Natural Resources committee  There are two things involved here. Where is this gas going to be going in northeastern British Columbia?

Natural Resources committee  I would say there's been difficulty in having good visionary concepts on land-use development in British Columbia.

Natural Resources committee  If I might, there was a proposal in November 1994 by the commission on resources and environment commissioner, and what he wanted to enact was legislation that allowed the public to get involved with land-use policy, and he said that they had a legislative right to do so.

Natural Resources committee  With the evolution of cumulative effect studies over the last 30 years, for instance, there has been a difficulty for scientists to undertake these things, understandably, because of the repercussions of the conclusions from these studies, which would limit development. There is politics about cumulative effects.

Natural Resources committee  Oh, sorry, the oil sands. Sorry about that.

Natural Resources committee  It's even in the United States. With the Bush administration, for instance, a very serious thing occurred. The Bush-Cheney administration allowed the energy companies to enter public lands, public forest lands, forest reserves, and those areas were impacted and undermined. Lots of people rose up to say, “No planning is going on.

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely. This is the process that's proceeding in the United States. Tim from Apache mentioned that fracking is an old thing. Actually, fracking started off in a new kind of way in Alabama in the 1980s as coal bed methane areas, coal beds, were being fracked. This was new technology.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, it is problematic because there are companies that have made investments. The unfortunate thing now is that because they have done this, and the B.C. government has allowed this, as in British Columbia, it's going to become very difficult to say no to these things or to say to wait.

Natural Resources committee  Oh, okay.

Natural Resources committee  As these things evolve, sure we've got lots of money, but now we have to deal with the problems that should have been dealt with to begin with, as I pointed out in the quote from 1986 about trying to establish what's going to happen on the land before giving out these lease agreements.

Natural Resources committee  The government has reported that they've received well over $2 billion in land lease sales. There are figures out on that. The question that we have about this, of course, is the way in which it was done. This was done so quickly, without public input. Even though the Oil and Gas Commission has its report about cumulative effects, when these land sales began in 2003, essentially, and I think Encana was one of the first companies that got prime areas in these leases—

Natural Resources committee  In British Columbia? The Environmental Assessment Act process and legislation was introduced in 1995. When the B.C. Liberal administration came in, they started to remove things and water it down. There was a tremendous amount of pressure by companies to do so, and they're sympathetic to that, so they started doing that.