Thank you, Mr. Chair. I, too, support this motion. It was a motion that cooperatively and collaboratively developed by the committee. Unfortunately, it did not make it through the committee's public clause-by-clause review of the bill, but it has been kindly brought forward by my colleague, the honourable Member for Frame Lake.
This is exactly, as he says, a one-time review to check in on the health of the act, and it is important because the public who came out to speak with the committee, and who the department engaged in developing the bill, had very high expectation of what this legislation ought to look like, and as I have said before, I think that this is a good way to take a private Member's bill and make it more like a public bill, with greater linkages to the entire apparatus of government and updating it so that it can be of better use to people in 2019.
That being said, the expectations of the public were that this would be a rights-based exercise that was firmly entrenched in that concept and that the rights that the act guarantees were stronger and more tied to a right to a healthy environment. I think that there is a lot of merit in that idea. That wasn't really the intention of this bill, and even though those things are mentioned, the explicit intention was not to do that.
I think that there is a real need to satisfy the public's interests in seeing this legislation be further developed, and this is a good motion to get us there. It's not the next government, so the 19th Assembly is not being called on to review this; it's the 20th. That is enough time for this to play out, for the department to see how it has been working, and to look at those issues that were left on the cutting room floor, so to speak. It is not overly onerous on government. It is not overly onerous on the Legislative Assembly. Legislative Assembly reviews things like this all the time.
I see no problem with this. I think that it is a good way of keeping track of something that, again, the public was very interested in. I always feel bad, as a legislator, when we are sitting in front of an audience, and they have a lot of ideas about how to improve how the government's laws work or how the governments work, and they're just outside of the scope of the bill, so we want to be able to address it, but we just can't. I think that this is good opportunity to, again, go back and check in on that and make sure that we are capturing adequately what the public wants to see from their laws in their territory. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
