 Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Camille Cameron. I'm the Dean at the Shulig School of Law and it's my great pleasure to be able to extend this very warm welcome to everyone today. I know you didn't come to see me, but I'll pretend for a few minutes that that's why you're here. I'm also welcoming you to our inaugural, inaugural Chuck Maher Law Hour. Chuck was class of 83. I'm not going to say anything more about him at this time, but I'll be introducing someone in a minute who will. I'm going to begin by acknowledging that we're holding this event today on traditional Mi'gma'a lands. And just to say a few words about Law Hour. Law Hour is a valuable and vital tradition at the Shulig School of Law. It's always been student run and run very well. They do an amazing job. In fact, I met with some of them at the beginning of the term. They were going to tell me what their schedule was and they already had the whole year's schedule worked out and it was a very impressive list of speakers. And that's the kind of effort that our students have put in year after year to make Law Hour such a big contribution to the life of the law school. Students have used our Law Hours as an opportunity to invite leaders from law, business, politics, the NGO community, and public policy arenas to the law school to talk with the law school community and to the wider community. In Chuck Maher's time at the law school, he was very involved in both the design and the organization of Law Hour. His friends, family, and colleagues, and especially his classmates, John Rogers and Daryl Frithandler, believe that this initiative reflects Chuck's commitment not only to the law school but to legal education students and the local and national communities. We're thankful for John's and Daryl's leadership and they've worked with Nadine Woon from our Advancement Office to make the Chuck Maher Law Hour fund possible. Thanks to the generosity of donors and the hard work of Nadine Woon, the market value of the fund now stands at around $70,000 with approximately 2,000 available immediately to assist the students in their efforts to organize Law Hour. And of course that fund will grow and with it the opportunity to make Law Hour even better. With that now, I'm going to turn things over to John Rogers. John is Class of 83, a friend of Chuck's and he's going to tell us a few things about Chuck Maher. John. Thanks Camille. It's wonderful to be here. I will say Chuck and I and I think others in our class are here. We were never in the front of the classroom, all right. So as Dean Cameron mentioned, this is the inaugural Chuck Maher Law Hour. It's a law hour supported by a fund which was established by Chuck's estate, his family, friends, classmates, and clients really to honor his life and legacy. I met Chuck on the first day of law school. We were walking back from a class here along Vernon Street and we're the best of friends until his death in 2015. Chuck came to the law school for medicine hat via Queens where he did an undergraduate degree in history. As was said, he was a member of the class of 1983 and after that he really lived the welter traditions through a distinguished legal career and a dedication to public service. Chuck had a varied career. He started in Ottawa as a senior staff member for the Minister of Labor and then Minister of Defense, a partner at McCarthy-Tetros Calgary Office and laterally as a senior solicitor at TransAlta. He was engaged in many, many community organizations as diverse as the Dow Law Alumni, Calgary Legal Aid, the Fort Calgary Preservation Society, and a campaign manager for the Honorable Joe Clark. These and many other contributions and attributes earned Chuck a place in the law school's prestigious Bertha Wilson Honor Society in 2012. Chuck's foundation was really built here at Dalhousie Law School where he was a top student. He was the president of the Law Students Society and he was an active law speaker or law speaker's committee member, as Camille mentioned. The fund created in Chuck's memory is meant to embody his commitment to the law school, to legal education, robust public policy debate, and engagement in community. By supporting Law Hour, a student led undertaking since the 1960s, which brings real-life perspective from lawyers, judges, policymakers, academics, and politicians and others to the law school from across the country and around the world. Contributors to Chuck, the Chuck Maher Law Hour, did so because of the kind of person that Chuck was. He was loyal, honorable, civil, thoughtful, kind, sharing, humorous, honestly anything that you could want in a leader or a best friend. Conversations with Chuck were always engaging, entertaining, interesting, insightful, and genuine. The range of topics were broad, history, current affairs, geography, travel, literature, philosophy, biography, politics, lots of politics. And Chuck kept in touch with his many friends and he came back to Nova Scotia from wherever he was across the country every year following his graduation from law school. The Chuck Maher Law Hour will, I think for his friends in a way, continue to bring Chuck back to Nova Scotia and the law school to be part of another really good conversation each year. I know that Chuck would be incredibly pleased that our classmate and dear friend Elizabeth May is the speaker at the inaugural Chuck Maher Law Hour. And I really want to thank Elizabeth for agreeing to do so. And I'm pleased to turn the podium back to Camille to introduce Elizabeth. Thanks very much, John. Sometimes people say I'm now about to introduce someone who needs no introduction and I think that's appropriate in this context, but it's polite to introduce and so that's what I'm going to do. Elizabeth May is leader of the Green Party of Canada and its first elected member of parliament representing Saanich Gulf Islands in Southern Vancouver Island. In 2005, Elizabeth was made an officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of her decades of leadership in the Canadian environmental movement. She graduated from Dalhousie Law School in 83 and was admitted to the bars in both Nova Scotia and Ontario. She practiced law in Ottawa with the Public Interest Advocacy Centre prior to becoming Senior Policy Advisor to the Federal Minister of the Environment. That was 86 to 88. For 17 years, Elizabeth served as Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada. She's a proud mother and grandmother. She lives in Sydney, British Columbia. She's the author of eight books. That's what she does in her spare time, including her most recent book, Who We Are, Reflections on My Life and on Canada. And one final thing I'll say that's not in the script when Elizabeth was here about a year and a half ago and she spoke, one of the things that I've never forgotten is that she said to the assembled crowd, law school changed my life and I thought that was a very profound and touching comment. So I'm going to turn things over now to our guest speaker, Elizabeth May. Thank you. So I actually want to say it again, law school saved my life and I'll tell you why. I want to start by acknowledging that we stand here, I stand, you sit. We are here together on the traditional unceded territory of the MiGMA, Malaseet, Pasamaquati First Nation and in their language I say, thank you. It's really an honor and hard to follow my dear friend, John Rogers, with other classmates here in front of me that I haven't seen in a long time, to be the first lecturer in a Law Hour series in the name and in memory of one of my best friends too, Chuck Maher of Medicine Hot and of every place in Canada, big and small, that a wonderful big hearted man could love with all his heart. He was a Canadian first and foremost and I always had a sense that Chuck thought all Canada would be just fine if you could draw them up on the front porch and have a chat. So there are many things in which Chuck excelled. He died far too young. For those of you, most of you in the room, this sounds like a ripe old age, but at 57 I swear to God it's far too young to lose someone as wonderful as Chuck and he would and does love this that this is happening. As John said, it's really something for a medicine boy to fall in love with Nova Scotia the way he did. He never stopped coming back to Nova Scotia and prizing his time here as particularly important in his life of all his wonderful accomplishments, I would say above all else. Chuck Maher excelled at friendship. Nobody did it better. So I've got to shift gears and talk to you about the topic which is a topic related to law. I see Meinert Dahl here who's a dear friend and who whose opinion will matter to me a lot because he knows a lot more about environmental law now than I do because now I'm in the business of trying to repair statutes. It's hard and my former professor, it's hard to repair bad laws and of course friend and former professor Vaughn Black is here so it's very, very hard for me to see so many old friends and want to acknowledge everyone. But I titled this talk Bad Laws and Good Intentions. It's been a long process for me as someone who went into law with the intention of using law to protect the environment to see laws wrecked and then try to repair them and it's a long process. I would say that when I do mean it Dean Cameron that this law school particularly saved my life because my parents had moved us so I won't go through my life story because it will interrupt the flow of environmental law and why I need your help that's the subtext I need your help. But my family moved when I was in my late teens from a more conventional kind of life outside of Hartford Connecticut to a village of 42 people on the Cabot Trail and opened a restaurant in a town where people didn't eat out. It didn't go well for us so I couldn't afford to go to undergrad. I never had undergrad now Jocelyn there says that she's the one who told me that you could get to Dalhousie Law School as a mature student without an undergrad degree. I'd kind of remembered it as Elizabeth Cusack Walsh but who knows I found out and I immediately called and I applied and took the LSATs and I do feel that at that point in my life I was working as a volunteer in my community organizing against the broad scale application of toxic pesticides which have since been banned by aircraft across Cape Breton Island. We were successful on that campaign we were able to convince the government of the day not to spray which was wonderful but I had come to some degree of I won't say notoriety but certainly I'd done enough media that when I applied to Dalhousie Law School somebody said okay well there'd be an environmentalist that we could admit without an undergrad degree if she can do the LSATs and if she can get through the interview and so on so I really did feel and do to this day that admission to Dalhousie Law School was not just a turning point in my life but really a life rope and I've been very grateful ever since. I should also mention that in the first week of first year law when I met John and I met Chuck and I met Jane and I also met friends and colleagues and I now refer to as friends from work so in case you didn't know also in the class of 83 Speaker of the Senate George Fury Speaker of the House Jeff Regan and I all hail from the class of 83. Erin O'Toole graduated much later and keeps trying to be something of a hanger on to our class but we just as much as I like Erin the class of 83 is the class of 83 and we're just going to keep it that way. What has happened over the years is I mean when you want to use law when you think about we need to protect the environment there must be a law and that's an impulse that comes early and then you get to law school at least in a Canadian law school and you discover well all those wonderful books like Sue the Bastards they come from the United States where there's actually ways you can prosecute people who are destroying the environment there there's much more substantive environmental law south of the border and and statute law than here so we you can try to use tort law certainly I did with a group of residents some of you may have read the Palmer case from anything you're doing on environmental law when a group of us tried to stop the spraying of Agent Orange in Nova Scotia you'll all be pleased to know the judge at the time ruled that Agent Orange was safe we lost that case but we did manage in the course of these temporary injunction we had holed off spraying long enough that it became illegal to sell it in Canada not through action of the Canadian government by the way the Canadian government never took regulatory action against Agent Orange but when the US government through the EPA forced Dow to no longer sell it abroad you could no longer buy it in Canada which is how Agent Orange came to be deregistered in this country tort law is hard to use for environmental law to say you can't trespass on my property what you're doing constitutes public or private nuisance or both very tough ways to make a case to protect yourself the same is true for criminal law you could you know prosecute you could go to the RCMP and lay in information about destruction of the environment if you can attach it to the Fisheries Act but this is very rarely done in the scheme of things the environmental law cases that you're likely to find and if you want to practice environmental law the areas that you end up pursuing fall in the category of administrative law given this statute has this decision maker followed the process in a way that reflects what we used to call procedural fairness but is does it actually meet the requirements or can you go for mandamus can you go for certiorari are there remedies available to you under administrative law so it really matters what kind of statutes you have because the question of are the decision makers following the process that they're supposed to follow under this statute is essentially what you've got and when I first started looking at environmental law as a Cape Ratner I didn't realize it at the time but in 1976 when as a volunteer I walked into the doors of Bedeck High School to be involved in an environmental assessment of a hydro dam built in what had been part of Cape Bretton Highlands National Park the Wreck Cove Dam I didn't realize when I participated in that environmental review that it was the very first public process of environmental assessment in Canadian history I just blundered in the doors it was my my my home ground Cape Bretton Island so that was 1976 and it was an environmental review held under the environmental assessment review process the acronym was unfortunate it was ERP what we all knew that we were dealing with the environmental assessment review process and it was by order in council in other words it wasn't legislated but it was a cabinet decision that there should be an environmental review whenever a project was on federal land involved federal funding or federal jurisdiction and for some time there was a bit of a debate about how enforceable was this environmental assessment review process did every project on federal land really have to go through it how would we do it and it was evolving and being used and it was clear what federal land federal money meant federal jurisdiction was a little harder to figure out because as we all know under the constitution you can find very clear mixed examples you know in any body of water across Canada that's interior fresh water the water is provincial but the fish are federal so how involved does the federal did you not if you hadn't had it hadn't occurred to you really environmental law is a mixed bag and so it evolved and then again I kind of stumbled into something I didn't mean to keep being involved in breakthrough environmental assessment process but I was working and this is also due to friends at law school I should mention something to you right now look around and see the people you're seeing if it hasn't occurred to you yet these are your lifetime friends and you'll have networks that you just can't imagine the times you're going to run into each other again but having practiced law in Halifax and then it was practicing law in Ottawa it was a classmate from law school who said the minister of environment he was in his office really wants Rob right wants you to come work for him and I say does he know I'm not a Tory yeah yeah but they still think you might be able to help them so anyway I and then at the same time Chuck was in Bill McKnight's office we were quite a good crew I was senior policy advisor to federal minister of environment in the majority government of Brian Mulroney progressive conservative and it was an extraordinary opportunity to do many wonderful things and the track record is great for that government but there was an occasion when I realized that my boss had broken the law so I quit and that was the rafferty Alameda decision and that went to federal court and in 1989 the federal court ruled that yes the question that had been sort of on people's minds is the environmental assessment review process under the ordering council legally binding federal court said yes it's legally binding it's kind of a nice vindication if you leave because you think someone's broken the law and the federal court said damn right so anyway but it was already by the time the federal court trial division ruled that the federal government had violated its obligations under the boundary waters treaty and the international rivers protection laws by approving dams in Saskatchewan uh which were upstream from both north dakota and manitoba cirrus river loops up and back by the time that decision was reached the federal government of Brian Mulroney had taken had already moved quite far along the process of legislating environmental assessment and that led us to the canadian environmental assessment act which had virtually cleared all its hurdles before the 1993 election but the final stages in royal assent happened after an election when Jean Chrétien had become prime minister but but the heavy lifting was all done in the Mulroney era and the canadian environmental assessment act attempted to bring more precision to this question of what do we mean by federal jurisdiction what are we going to do environmental assessment on exactly and that evolved over time and i am doing this rather superficially but essentially what happened was it developed towards something called the law list so in a general broad sense you can make a case for federal jurisdiction in all kinds of ways but the seah canadian environmental assessment act created more precision by saying certain statutes certain sections of certain statutes involving certain decisions of ministers will always require that they be reviewed by seah this became known as the law list and most of the environmental reviews that were triggered tended to be due to decision making under the navigable waters protection act and the fisheries act so to go back to those pieces of legislation foundational pieces of environmental law before the word environment was used because both pieces of legislation date back to the government of the administration of Sir John A. McDonald not recent statutes very clear statutes so in any place where fish are found you're not supposed to contaminate the water in a way that fish don't like basically and over time the fisheries act also evolved in more environmental ways the father of our current minister of fisheries current minister of fisheries being Dominic Leblanc his father Romeo Leblanc as minister of fisheries brought in habitat protection for those fish so the fisheries act then said in section 35 you can't even temporarily alter or destroy the habitat of fish without a permit from the minister of fisheries so that became another trigger under the law list by the time the law list was created the navigable waters protection act on the other hand a little later than the fisheries act came in in 1882 and the purpose of the navigable waters protection act was to protect a head of power that is exclusively federal so no other level of government can protect rights to navigation to say that any canadian any place and actually it wasn't restricted to canadian anybody any place i guess when you think about it there wasn't any requirement for citizenship there's an absolute right that if you've got a canoe or a kayak or anything that floats that you can put yourself in and you can get down a body of water you have a right to that and if another entity is going to somewhere along that navigable water create an obstruction to your right to navigation that also requires a permit this one from the minister of transportation so those pieces of legislation have been in place for more than a century and much more a century and a half and yes we are at 150 years so we've had these laws for a very long time and they became part and parcel of an evolving environmental assessment regime and i have to say now compared again to the radical laws passed in the us much earlier in the late 60s and i'm sure you recognize this name as a stellar environmentalist from days of old richard nixon that's when we got really strong environmental laws in the us and the national environmental policy act created much clearer environmental assessment rules in such a way that the judge could put him or herself in the position of a minister review the evidence and say for instance in the case of the spotted owl a judge in the us was able to say given their legislation i don't think that the forest biologists working for the government adequately considered the habitat requirements of the spotted owl and i decree no logging shall happen over this zone there's never been a time in canadian environmental assessment law where that could happen that's us that's tougher law but still as the canadian environmental assessment act limped along with five year reviews with amendments with changes one of the complaints was that there were too many assessments sometimes a project would go through a provincial review that would have to go through a federal review and this was all too much so the laws were the law was amended over the years the process was improved to ensure one project one assessment you could have joint reviews so and over time it changed from projects to move through a decision tree and if there was a really big issue it would automatically go to a panel it changed to you can do screenings and those are paper processes in and out someone can track a screening and at some point after and generally canada was going through thousands of screenings a year they weren't elaborate exercises but they were ways to make sure that the checklist was checked that you knew that this navigable water that was going to be obstructed didn't really create a disaster for that navigable water or that this alteration of fish habitat was acceptable or there was a way to have no net loss and maybe another body of water could be improved for that fish habitat so there were lots of tweaks and one might say weakening in some areas strengthening and others but it worked so that it were there was a predictability to it you go along this route you have paper screenings and at a certain point you have to decide is it going to a comprehensive study which was a bigger effort but still on paper or does it have to go to a panel review which involved public hearings and people in the room now all of that was destroyed in uh night in 2011 no yes yeah 2011 holy mack no 2012 in the spring of 2012 bill c 38 first omnibus budget bill came out and the second one in the fall c 45 second omnibus budget bill uh the first one c 38 in the spring i remember grabbing this tome 400 some pages sitting down at my desk in parliament in the house and turning it page after page and realizing there's 70 different laws in here most of them are environmental laws a lot of them are being repealed and when i hit the environmental assessment section i i i i remember the process it did end in tears and i'm sitting at my desk just sort of shaking because the last line on the last part of some 40 or so pages of the environmental assessment portion of this omnibus budget bill was and the canadian environmental assessment act is hereby repealed and the replacement is extraordinarily weak now there was also when bill c 38 the omnibus budget bill uh the elimination of the protection of fish habitat a redefinition of what kind of fish we have it turned out this redefinition of what kind of fish we have came right from the canadian electricity association brief that there were fish in canada and they could be protected if they were uh commercially harvested recreationally fished or aboriginally fished now i think that might have covered every fish who knows but if humans weren't using them they weren't fish and the laws changed around habitat protection and the laws changed about how much pollution you could add to the water and they actually changed the pollution piece through regulation to say it was no longer enough to ban an activity or need a permit if you added substances that were deleterious to fish you had to have what's called the ld 50 lethal dose for 50 of the population and if what you were doing didn't immediately kill off 50 of the fish it was okay so these laws were being substantially changed by c 45 the fall of the same year another omnibus bill i'd love to tell you more about c 45 because it included uh little sleeper items like getting rid of the inspector general for cecis so that the minister responsible for public security no longer had anyone reporting to them to let them know what cecis was doing which was there as a provision to protect the minister from embarrassments such as what happened when the rc and p not cecis burnt down that barn in kebec mean there was a reason to have an internal inspector general for cecis that was eliminated in c 45 provisions that people can't come to canada as tourists without permits those are extraneous to this talk but it was another omnibus bill but it took apart the navigable waters protection act it renamed it the navigation protection act so it not only it's not it's sort of ironic the word waters disappeared from the title navigable waters protection act became navigation protection act and waters disappeared from protection throughout canada what you got out of our millions of lakes and rivers and streams across canada was instead it's navigable if it's on this list here a schedule of named waterways now what i wanted to talk about in terms of bad laws and good intentions is that the new liberal administration uh trudeau's liberals clear platform commitments to repair the environmental assessment act to review what happened to the navigable waters protection act and restore lost protections to fix the fisheries act all these pieces were part of the promise of a platform they were repeated quite clearly in a speech from the throne and in clear language as well in which i commend trudeau for doing mandate letters that were made public so it was very clear and i thought you know i i really didn't think there'd be any doubt at all that two years in to a new government we would not be over i forgot one of the other worst things that happened under c 38 was a whole new regime for energy projects so that they would be reviewed not by the canadian environmental assessment agency but if they were a pipeline the environmental review for the first time would be done by the national energy board the offshore drilling in atlantic canada would be done by the canada nova scotia offshore petroleum board or the canada newfoundland labrador offshore petroleum board and if it was a nuclear facility by the canadian nuclear safety commission none of these agents have agencies have ever done environmental reviews before and having been an intervener in the kinder morgan review before the neb i have to say they they should never be allowed to do an environmental review again but all of this change i thought two years in would be repaired by now and it's this is why i started by saying i need your help because i actually think that the ministers in the cabinet of prime minister justin trudeau intended to fix these things and it's also very clear to me as i stand before you right now that when they finish amending changing repairing the the acts i've spent most of my time here today talking to you about the navill waters protection act the fisheries act and the canadian environmental assessment act only the fisheries act will be repaired in a way that makes it recognizable to its pre 2006 itself i attribute much of what i expect to see of repair to the fisheries act through the accident of history that i mentioned earlier romeo leblanc put habitat protection in the fisheries act and no matter what the department of fisheries and oceans tells dominic leblanc he knows that he wants to put back the habitat protection for fisheries he's also from new brunswick and not that everybody from the maritimes is better i'm from british columbia i have to say but i think it doesn't hurt that dominic knows some rivers so he's going to i think dominic leblanc will restore the fisheries act mostly to where it was mark garneau is an old friend of mine a fabulous human being and his mandate letter couldn't be clearer it says review what the previous government did to the and it's the title in his mandate letter is navigable waters protection act and restore lost protections now the caveat is i haven't seen draft legislation i haven't i've gone through at this point i think four versions of consultations on these various provisions we had expert panels on the national energy board expert panels on environmental assessment parliamentary committee study on navigable waters parliamentary committee study on the fisheries act and then all of those were put out for further consultation so actually it's not three rounds it's it's three rounds times four for each of these things that i've provided comment so given the way the discussion documents have moved it's very clear to me now that unless we can change the direction of the decision making in the federal government the navigable waters protection act will not be restored to protect waterways across canada but will remain a schedule with ways to add additional waterways one at a time it's also clear to me now that the environmental assessment act is not going to be repeal report repaired in the way that the expert panel recommended the expert panel which was by the way a superb job chaired by joe angeline former commissioner of environment for canada and she chaired this there were lots of very smart environmental lawyers on the panel with her as well as hearings held across canada process must have cost at least a million probably more very good advice that the environmental assessment process should be a standalone quasi judicial body with the ability to do environmental reviews for federal land federal money federal jurisdiction and that they had they also changed it from environmental assessment to impact assessment there's some other details there but the guts of what that committee report of what the expert panel reported resonated with what the national energy board expert panel reported the national energy board expert panel report said no the national energy board should not do environmental reviews the expert panel in ea said no the the national energy board should not do environmental reviews right now it looks like the national energy board will continue to do joint environmental reviews with the canadian environmental assessment agency the offshore petroleum boards just a month ago for the first time were made responsible authorities under SEA to do environmental reviews. So it's moving in a very bad direction. The Environmental Assessment Act, as I expect to see it, will be wonderful on the process side. Some of you may recall, if you've been digging into environmental law, that the C38 version of Environmental Assessment said you could only be an intervener if you were directly affected. So you couldn't have a public interest concern and get in the doors an intervener. I don't doubt for a minute that there's going to be greater engagement of indigenous peoples, greater openness to allow people in the doors interveners, that direct effect is not going to be the standing threshold. But the number of projects that are going to go through review that shrank under Bill C38 in 2012 from thousands a year to dozens a year is going to stay closer to dozens. So we'll be able to see a lot of improvement on process, but on the substance because they don't intend to bring back the law list. They don't intend to cover projects that are funded with federal money. And they don't intend to ensure that environmental reviews are done by an environmental assessment agency without what they've now dubbed. This is a new term to me. If anyone here from administrative law background knows of this, they've elevated these agencies that have never had any environmental assessment background, the National Energy Board, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Offshore Petroleum Board. These are now referred to as life cycle regulators. And those will still be involved in environmental review. So I have gone through something close to the torments of the damned. I keep trying to figure out what the hell. I think Dominique LeBlanc, well, Dominique I've said is probably going to do a good thing. Mark Greno is a hell of a nice guy and thoroughly honest and upstanding. This is an industry pressure. There's something very weird happening, and I think it was a culture change that happened within the civil service under 10 years under the previous government. Part of it being an instinct for self-preservation. Because when these changes were made under the previous government, money for these departments to carry out these functions was slashed. None of these departments at a level of deep work bureaucracy actually trust, actually nor should they, that they're going to get a whole lot more money when the acts are prepared. So in self-preservation, they are not wanting to reassert that if someone's about to clog a waterway in a remote area of the Northwest Territories where indigenous people traditionally put a boat in the water to go fishing, they don't want to know about it. They don't want to know that someone has to get a permit from them. And similarly, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency doesn't want to reassert the responsibility to review even on paper thousands of projects. So people practicing environmental law are going to be down to very thin gruel indeed. I think you're going to have to specialize in how to get people out of jail for blockading projects for which there is no longer any administrative legal remedy. I say that only somewhat facetiously. So in the time that we have remaining, before these bills emerge for first reading, it is the best time to try to persuade the government not to do the things that look at this point as though they're pretty well cast in stone. Until the moment of first reading, nothing's cast in stone. And as I said, I think these are people, including the Prime Minister, of good will and good intention who are about to completely blow their grade for how well have you done on keeping your commitments under the platform to environmental action. I'm going to stop there because I really want to open up the floor for questions and discussion. And I think we have till 1.30 if I'm not wrong about it, because it is law hour. I do remember that much. And I'm hoping it isn't another version of this hour, it has 20 minutes in which case I've used up twice the time. So I do want to thank you for your attention and for letting me explain to you what I think is happening right now. I'm really keen to talk more about where I think we can make the mid-course correction to ensure that our environmental laws are, as a bottom line, at least as good as they were in 2006. And right now I'm being told by ministerial assistance, bureaucracy, and even some NGOs that I should give up because that's too much to hope for. I don't accept that. In the 21st century, Canadians expect us to have laws at least as good as what we had before 2006, even if we can't dare to dream that we would have laws as good as the ones that Richard Nixon passed. Thank you. So, and if you could say your name when you ask your question, that'd be awesome. Young man in the back there. The federal... Or nation regulations? No. I haven't heard about them bringing back the regulations yet at all because that's a level of detail that I'm not seeing. Have you heard anything? Yes, checking, Miles. I know. I mean, we're at the level of trying to figure out what they're going to be doing. Mine, I'm looking over at you. Is there anything you've heard on that? That's what I think, yeah. We're still waiting for when I ask them when is first reading likely to be. There's a fuzziness around that. And I'm happy. As long as we haven't gone to first reading, there's a chance to repair this at the fundamental architectural level. Because structurally, once you say environmental assessment in Canada, for instance, doesn't include federal money anymore, or doesn't include a law list, by the way, what will it be? A project list. And then how do you define projects? What projects are included? Is that adequate? Certainly there was... It's interesting how much I'm now in league with the Mining Association of Canada because the Mining Association of Canada has more corporate memory than Environment Canada. And I have memory, and Mac has memory, and Mac, as the Mining Association of Canada, didn't have any problem with SIA as it was before Harper repealed it. They liked it better because it was predictable, and they would like to see it come back. So when I'm working with them, they understand this. They're also... May I shouldn't speak for the Mining Association of Canada. I think that a number of their member groups might not like it. But they're in the same boat I'm in of being rather horrified, as there are a lot of environmental law groups, obviously, in seeing the fundamental architecture of why do you do environmental assessment federally? Surely it's to say that when you're spending federal dollars, you've bothered to think through what are the impacts. And if you're on federal land, you're worrying about... And if you're exercising jurisdiction under a federal statute, you ought to know what's going on. And it's something that I hope we can convince Catherine McKenna. And of course, the Naval Waters Protection Act is some place where we have to convince Mark Garneau. And yes, another question on the aisle. Hi. What's your name? My name is Fabian. Thanks, Ms. Macbeth-Fan. I was just wondering about... When you said that the... So I just feel that the NEU is still doing reviews. I just lose some of the information when the energy is in the news a lot. Yeah. But so I'm confused about... Who was it within the National Energy Board that was agreeing that they should not be doing the reviews? Not with the... Okay. Good question. Yes, the National Energy Board, we're still operating under what's known as CEA 2012. So the law of the land is still that as of the 2012 omnibus budget bills rewrite of the law. We're in a process of consultation upon consultation about how we will change and repair the laws that were changed by the previous government. The National Energy Board expert panel didn't include members of the National Energy Board. The expert panel included the head of the Canadian Pipeline Association. They did a fantastic job in the NEB review and they said the National Energy Board should be renamed the Canadian Electricity Transmission Commission, should be moved from Calgary to Ottawa, that didn't go over well and should have nothing to do with doing environmental assessments. That advice was also based on the fact that the National Energy Board, and this is another whole large topic area, when the National Energy Board decrees that something is in the national interest, it's doing it within the confines of very specific statutory assessment of transmission of energy. So the National Energy Transmission Commission is a more accurate description of what this entity is now than the title National Energy Board. When I was before the National Energy Board's process on Kinder Morgan, just to give you an example, the largest union in Northern Alberta representing oil sands workers is Unifor, and their lawyer, they were officially accepted as interveners in the process. They attempted to enter into evidence, evidence that the building of Kinder Morgan would cost Canadian jobs and lead to the closure of the Chevron refinery in Burnaby. So they were trying to protect union jobs by stopping Kinder Morgan's pipeline. Now the only reason I mention this is that the National Energy Board ruled that Unifor's evidence was inadmissible because questions of jobs were outside their jurisdiction. So in a common sense definition to the average Canadian, when the NEB announces that a project is in Canada's national interest and politicians pile on saying, yes, there's a gazillion jobs there, this is all nonsense because there's been no testing at all in any way shape or form when the evidence isn't admissible of how many jobs will be lost by going ahead. So this recommendation from the expert panel is quite significant that there should be a common sense understanding of what national interest means. The National Update now renamed, if they did it, Canadian Energy Transmission Commission would actually look at costs, benefits, economic impacts, job impacts, if they're going to pronounce upon something. So right now, you're quite right, the NEB was involved in reviewing Energy East until Trans-Canada withdrew its application. The NEB is now, we're still in front of the court, there are numerous court cases alleging violations of procedural fairness, what we used to call natural law, violations of indigenous rights, failure to consider very significant aspects of the project such as what happens when there's tankers in the water. None of that was acceptable before the NEB in the Kinder Morgan decision, so we don't know what the federal court will rule. But until the law changes to either do what the expert panel on the environmental assessment process recommended, which is to have no role whatsoever for these energy regulators in doing environmental reviews, the fact that the federal government at a political level has chosen to ignore the recommendations from expert panels that they commissioned at the cost of millions of dollars. Generally in politics, when an expert panel reports a commission of any kind with specific recommendations one through 80, at a certain point the minister responsible says, we're looking at recommendation one, we don't like recommendation two, here are our reasons. Instead, the current government squashed all four of the processes I mentioned earlier, two parliamentary committees, one on navigable waters, one on fisheries, two expert panels, one on EA, one on NEB, squished them all together and at the very end of June issued a 23-page discussion document which on reading it through two or three times to try to make sense of it, I realized meant that they didn't plan to pay any attention to the larger and more significant concrete recommendations of the panels they had asked for advice. Now I've seen a lot of hands, so I'm going to go, I see the young lady in the back and then to the young men here, you're all young, what am I saying, okay, the brilliant law student in the back, okay. The government not mentioning sustainability and what the significance of that would be moving forward with that environmental action by the government. You obviously looked at that discussion document, you're one of a couple hundred, I tried to alert people to it because it came out at the end of June, I'm grateful that you read it. It didn't, you're right, it did not mention the word sustainability once, all of that had been core to the recommendations of the environmental assessment panel that sustainability provide a framework. I'm baffled by that, I will not mention the names at all or even the departments of senior political staff who said, it's just because I don't like the word sustainability. I haven't had a better explanation than that and I won't say who told me that. But it's, I don't know what we read into that. I thought that discussion document was, if you were grading it, I would have given it an F. It was inconsistent, it said at one point, the environmental assessment process will be standalone and then you had to read again, another paragraph said, and every process will be joint with the National Energy Board, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the offshore boards. If they hadn't after the discussion paper came out and with no further decisions, taken concrete steps to pursue Harper's plan, which Harper hadn't had time to pursue, to have the offshore petroleum boards in regulation as responsible authorities under SEA. That just happened either late October or early November. That's a shocker. So it's hard to quite figure out, I say sometimes I figure out this decision making under, and I try not to be partisan because I fancy her conservative, but I tell you, under Harper it was not hard, I think everyone would agree with us, it was not hard to figure out the decision tree. Where did this decision come from? It was a bolt from, it was like a lightning bolt from PMO and it struck where it struck and it was made so. Under this government you've got to follow, it's more like a bowl of spaghetti. Sometimes, and it was true because Justin Trudeau has done a good thing in recreating cabinet government, but some cabinet ministers have a different approach than other cabinet ministers. Some departments give better advice than other departments and sometimes Jerry Butts makes up his mind and then that's it. So you try to figure it out on each decision, where did that piece of spaghetti go? But I have to say in that whole approach there's a lot more opportunity for influence because I don't think it's all caving to industry pressure. I don't think there's that much industry pressure. I think the bigger problem is departmental status quo and trans-agents fear. I talked to some bureaucrats, and I don't use the term bureaucrat at all without respect, I have to say, the civil service does an amazing job. And I was speaking to a senior diplomat the other day and said, yeah, he said, it's all fine, well and good for the government to say, you're free, speak your mind. It's okay now. And all around me, people are thinking, you think they met it? What do you think? I don't know, I don't know, you think they met it? So caution is still deeply ingrained. This is human nature we're talking about more than monolithic institutions. And it takes a while for things to shift and without a public awareness that all is happening. So the other big piece about a democracy that's really right now for Canada on life support is a full engaged fourth estate. What's happening to our news media? 30, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, a question of what's going to happen to environmental law in the Fisheries Act would have been in your daily newspaper and people would have read about. If, can you imagine that the largest union representing oil stands workers was forbidden from entering into evidence that the building of Kinder Morgan would cost Canadian jobs and the NAB said, that's not our jurisdiction. And I imagine none of you have read about that. Because I never saw it anywhere except in my increasingly frantic blogging. So, you've been waiting a long time. Thank you very much. I just want to thank you for your continued commitment to the environment, this country, and for giving us a little passion about environmental law. You're obviously brilliant. What's your name? Dad, nice to meet you. My question comes from this week's recognition by the federal minister of justice that they were going to support Romeo Sagnac's bill for absolutely very equal implementation of UNDRIF within that opinion of law. And my question was related to the updates and a renewal of the environmental assessment process. How do you see the commitment to UNDRIF and to indigenous rights in general, the warming sort of consultation and UNDRIF assessment process? Yes, so in case anyone didn't know that, it's a private member's bill put forward by NDP member who's also Cree Romeo Sagnac. And I've been a supporter of his bill and I'd urge Jodi Wilson-Raybould to do this, but Jodi Wilson-Raybould herself, our first indigenous woman, minister of justice, and implementing UNDRIF was in the liberal platform. But I'd heard Jodi saying in previous occasions, well, we want to implement UNDRIF, but we can't actually implement it as is without modification. I'm very pleased. Now, the first jurisdiction in Canada to be operating under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is British Columbia. Because in the context of negotiating a confidence and supply agreement, I'm sort of going to assume that you have a rough familiarity with the fact that the three green MLAs in BC are not in a coalition with the governing new Democrats, but made a decision for which party would best reflect what the public had tried to express from the way they voted on May 9th of this year. So that the one of the quid pro quos, if you will, that put John Horgan in his premiere was a top line commitment that the government of British Columbia will operate under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In the context of this endless consultation over Environmental Assessment, the Fisheries Act, the Naval Waters Protection Act, there's clear, immediate connection to the rights of Indigenous peoples when you look at those laws. The government had set up a separate process for consultation with First Nations, at least First Nations, but I imagine it also included Inuit and Métis. And Chief Isidore Day of Serpent River First Nation was the chair of that group on behalf of First Nations and pulled the plug on the consultation saying the government's obviously going ahead without really talking to us and we're getting out of this because we don't think we're being listened to. So I'm not sure how, and you're quite right Dan, there's a looming conflict here. If you say you're going to operate under the United Nations Rights on Indigenous Peoples, Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and for the rights of all those of you who aren't Indigenous and like me are settler culture, we had promises and a speech from the throne and mandate letters, and we also have a right to say you've got to keep your promises, but much more so do the constitutionally enshrined rights of the people whose land we're on to ensure that when you're promised a real consultation, it be real. So there is the opportunity still that the environmental assessment process and the Naval Waters Protection Act, because if there's any particular group of people that you can imagine being in remote areas of Canada and wanting to put a boat in the water, chances are you're going to be dealing with Indigenous people a lot of the time. And if they find their waterways can be obstructed and there's no longer any remedy under the Naval Waters Protection Act or the Environmental Assessment Act, there's a direct conflict. So there are other layers and you're right to draw that one out. That's a more hopeful layer. And Jody only announced that the Liberals would vote for Romeo's bill just about three or four days ago. Well, I ran over and hugged her yesterday in the house, so it wasn't long ago. So these are all my friends. That's nothing I want to say about politics. We are not at daggers drawn. Even as much as I've talked about Stephen Harper, on a one-to-one basis, we got along just fine. Very respectful, able to talk to him, tried all the time. But there's a much greater degree of friendship in that place than is evident if you have the misfortune of watching Question Period. Now there was a hand way over here, and I know we're probably running very close to the end. You're probably going to have to run up. OK, yes. This will probably be the last one, hey? Yeah. Good. I'm probably going to go from here where you're going to be standing on the floor. I didn't want to run up the issue of energy. And I think that the truth about the election went a bit too far in the other direction, within the hardware industry, in setting the regulations and setting the rules and depending on the banding. For example, I think that they incorrectly focused on too much of the downstream impact of gas has to change pretty quickly the fact that that gas has to come from other countries with the worst human range records and the worst environmental control standards, and that we're going to have to be dealing with the only danger of translating by other groups, other than the federal, such as by train, for example. Which is totally safe, by the way. So let me just answer really quickly. First of all, I didn't get your name. Sam, I appreciate and applaud you for raising a contrarian point. And only due to lack of time, I'm going to do this really fast. All the current pipelines being proposed in Canada, Energy East, Keystone, well, Energy East is no longer being proposed. But in its initial proposal, Energy East, Keystone, and Kinder Morgan are all about shipping out primarily bitumen as a solid to other countries to be upgraded and refined. Now, if you go back to Peter Lawheed's plan for the oil sands and Peter Lawheed, for those of you who were wonderful men, former Premier and deceased Premier from Alberta, brilliant man, and his plan for developing the oil sands started with the first rule, think like an owner. If you're thinking like an owner, you take your bitumen, you want to upgrade it and refine it and use it in Canada and export the excess to other countries. Ralph Klein abandoned Peter Lawheed's plan a long time ago. And when investment disappeared in the 2008 financial crisis for building refineries, it never came back. There were originally up-graders and refineries on the drawing board. As the economy recovered, suddenly we had this pipeline mania for shipping raw bitumen out. Now, raw bitumen is a solid, so you might be wondering, how do you get in a pipeline? You import into Alberta fossil fuel condensate that they call diluent, but it's basically naphtha, they add butane, it's benzene, and they stir in bitumen to try to make it something, well, it does, it flows, but it's at different levels. In the winter you have to add a lot more diluent. The substance called dilbit, the bitumen mixed with diluent, is a substance that can't be cleaned up to the best of our knowledge. So Canada's Premier Scientific Academy, the Royal Society of Canada, has done a study on this, so is DFO locally here in Dartmouth. You have a look at that stuff if you want, but we don't know how to clean up dilbit. On the other hand, solid bitumen by itself on a train is safe as houses. What blew up in Lac-Meg-Antique was back and shale. I don't know how you'd ever want to ship back and shale, desperately dangerous, but the repeated assertion that everything that's crude oil, and of course bitumen isn't crude oil, and back and shale isn't really crude oil, that's in a pipeline is much safer than it would be on a train is exactly wrong when you're talking about shipping out solid bitumen, much safer on a train. The big additional bit of propaganda that was misleading around Energy East was the notion that it was coming to Atlantic Canada to be refined. Now pipelines can take different products with stoppers along the way, I'm sure probably some of you know pipeline technology, about 20% of what was going to be in Energy East was back and shale or other crude that could be refined in St. John at Irving. But everything that was bitumen mixed with diluent could not be refined anywhere in Atlantic Canada and was slated to be shipped out through the Bay of Fundy to ports elsewhere. And that's another reason why the largest union in Northern Alberta is against the pipelines because shipping out the bitumen means shipping out the jobs. And because Energy East was primarily for export, it would not have stopped the importation of almost a million barrels of oil a day from Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Nigeria and the tiny bit left that we still get in from Norway. If you followed what I would like to see happen, we would invest in upgradeers and refineries in Alberta. Then we could have pipelines that didn't have the risks of shipping raw bitumen mixed with diluent. It's not about the pipeline, it's about what's in it. So that's why I don't think, I mean the examination of upstream greenhouse gases is something that we used to do before 2006. The government would have been in a position to say, you know on balance we think we've got a good plan here and it's not that much after all. I mean the fact that they said study it did not stop that project. What stopped Energy East was Trump's approval of Keystone because the same company was pursuing both pipelines and when you have a pipeline glut, you can't fill two. With that, I pause for breath. I thank you for being here. God bless you Chuck, we're really missing you here. Thank you.