Environment committee  I'm not sure you can establish it upfront, and that was the point of my remark about why reviews should focus on what is new. You know, if you're just doing routine culvert construction or routine pipe installation at a river crossing, which has been done many times before, the

Environment committee  I'm not sure how you could put them into legislation or even regulation. A lot of it has to do with the culture of how we do things. I find that if I would go to, for example, the provision of information to panels by all participants.... I would draw attention to something that

Environment committee  It seems to me that when you get to the level of a strategic review, which is really some sort of policy-wide or region-wide assessment of something well beyond a project level, you're then beyond proponents. It's a proponent who proposes a project. Keep in mind that in our sys

Environment committee  Thank you. I really ought not to say very much about the question of lists. I don't feel I know enough about the pros and cons of that to give you a good answer. I think we all would agree that things should be done faster than slower, and that whatever can be done to speed up t

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  I don't think I could answer specifically how they will do that, but I would have to say that as in-house capacity within the federal government declines, it cannot but affect it adversely. You have to have competent scientists, who are capable of understanding what the problem i

Environment committee  I'm not sure how to answer the question, because I've heard a lot of different versions about what a strategic EA would be. In the absence of some better definitions, should it be legislated? Well, I guess in order to legislate it, you'd have to define what it is. I don't know i

Environment committee  Let's start with who does the monitoring now. This is distributed among such science agencies as Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, and Natural Resources Canada. I suppose, if you were looking at socio-economic monitoring, there would be Statistics Canada. There are a numb

Environment committee  Well, I think in order to design a sound, robust monitoring program, you need good science, and the science has to start somewhere. There's no reason to expect proponents to be doing that. I think proponents are sometimes asked to do far too much with respect to impact assessme

Environment committee  In terms of the role it plays, if you don't have effective monitoring, then all the work that was done in assessing the project basically has dissipated, because people made predictions but they were never verified. People made undertakings but they were never verified as to whet

Environment committee  I'd like to thank the committee for asking me to participate in this work. I've had the honour of serving on review panels for over eight years and have participated in review processes for forty. My written submission has addressed what major project review panels are intended