Thanks, Mr. Chair. I have a few brief comments, and I do have a couple of lines of questioning that I would like to pursue.
First off, I was quite surprised that committee received absolutely no submissions from industry. Not one. Nothing. There is no record of any submissions made to the department as part of their development of the bill, because all of the submissions are still available on their website. To me, that means that there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest on the part of industry in commenting on our regulatory regime that they are actually governed by. They don't seem to be all that interested in doing any work here. I just want to get that on the record.
Now, the scope of the changes that were made was very limited, and I do want to congratulate late the department and the Minister for reversing the onus on secrecy. Right now everything is secret. Now everything is going to be public, unless there is some reason to keep it secret. That is a good thing, so I want to thank the Minister and the department for doing that.
The scope of some of the changes in here, I don't think, are really where they can and should have been, and I will give a couple of examples. The Environment Studies Management Board can and should have been made a co-management approach. I had raised that while the bill was being developed on the floor of this House. That was not done in this bill. We have some tinkering in here to include some public representation on the Environmental Studies Management Board, but industry representatives still sit on this, and I think that that is an inherent conflict of interest.
The scope of the changes does not include royalties, one of the most fundamental things that we have inherited. Even on the Significant Discovery Licences, my colleague mentioned that this does not fix the problem of Significant Discovery Licences. Under this bill, the Minister will still retain incredible discretion over whether Significant Discovery Licences are issued and, more particularly, renewed, and I don't think that that creates certainty.
This bill does not deal with the issue of whether to frack or not. That was a commitment made by this government as part of the mandate, to ensure that our residents have an opportunity to make informed decisions about this matter. This bill does not address this in any significant way.
I want to move on to a couple of issues that I mentioned, Mr. Chair. I raised federal concurrence in my remarks on the report by committee. I would like to ask the Minister why he went out and sought federal concurrence on this legislation while it was before committee. Thanks, Mr. Chair.