Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm here today to discuss the Impact Assessment Act and the need to address the matter of trans-border environmental impacts.

I'm going to give my statement in English, but I can answer any questions you may have in French if you wish.

I'll start by saying that, as a parent, I agree with everything Ms. Yetman said. That's the end of my expertise on that subject matter.

I do have a bit of expertise, though, on the environment and the Constitution. I teach it and research it. On the side, I've litigated all the major cases in the Supreme Court of Canada since 1990 on the issue, except for the last one, where the court struck down the Impact Assessment Act. We were in France that year. I've also been involved in the development of every environmental impact assessment bill since 1992. I'm proud to say that the first one was introduced by the Conservatives and has enjoyed support by all parties in the House ever since then, for the last 30-plus years.

For today, I'm going to focus on the changes brought in to address the Supreme Court's decision. That's the purpose of the revisions in this bill. You have slides from me, by the way. If you don't like what I'm saying, there's a small slide deck in English and French that you can follow along.

The court really did two major things, but I'll only talk about one of them. The first thing they talked about was distinguishing between federal projects and provincial projects. The act more or less has that right. The second thing the court said was about making sure that assessments involve only “effects within federal jurisdiction”. That's the defined term in the act.

The court said that the definition was a little bit too broad and it needed to be tightened up. In particular, the court said that the federal government does not have jurisdiction over all aspects of cross-border environmental harm, such as greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn't have comprehensive authority over everything. It focused on saying that the act should limit itself to things that cause “significant...effects within federal jurisdiction” for cross-border impacts.

In the slides, which you can look at later, I've set out how this act defines “effects within federal jurisdiction” and compared it with the previous bill, which was the way the Harper government defined it in 2012. You may find it surprising that the Harper government defined it more broadly. In addition to fish and federal lands and migratory birds, which everyone agrees on, the previous version said that all cross-border pollution, everything that crosses a provincial or national border, is a federal matter, which intuitively makes sense.

This bill has narrowed that to just cross-border water pollution and marine pollution. It's just those two. It's gone far further than the court required by doing that. In effect, it's abandoned long-standing federal authority over cross-border environmental effects except in regard to water. As you will know, a core responsibility of the federal government is to deal with pollution problems that don't respect borders, that affect other provinces and other countries. If they didn't have that, it would undermine the ability of provinces to protect their own environment from upstream or upwind pollution.

I won't get into an in-depth lecture on constitutional law in two minutes and 30 seconds, but let me just say this: There is clear constitutional authority, recognized by the Supreme Court, to address international and cross-border environmental effects. The Supreme Court of Canada in 1997, in upholding the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, said the federal government can regulate pollution that causes “serious harm” and “move[s] across interprovincial or international borders”.

In upholding the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act in 2021, the court again said that Parliament may regulate over “serious extraprovincial harm” to the environment. In fact, Canada signed a treaty more than 30 years ago legally requiring it to do environmental assessments of any activity that may cause significant transboundary environmental harm. That's a treaty obligation and an international law obligation.

When I read the amendments, I was surprised to see that the act would cover cross-border water pollution but not cross-border air pollution. It seemed a little bit absurd, to be honest. Parliament has been legislating over cross-border air pollution since 1971. It's been regulating over greenhouse gases since 2010. Those regulations were brought in by the Harper government, and then again in 2012. They've been operating in this area for over 30 years.

I can't explain why such a cautious approach was taken, but it really leaves the Government of Canada unable to deal with a problem that can only be addressed at a federal level, which is pollution problems that move across national or provincial borders.

If you need any convincing, on the last slide I've given you some quick summaries of why cross-border air pollution is a big deal. There are 15,300 premature deaths each year in Canada from air pollution. The economic cost is $114 billion.

That's it.

Thank you very much.