Thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, this is a motion that was moved in committee. The Minister at the time said that he was not able to concur with it because we had basically run out of time. If people have views about this, I would appreciate hearing them, but it was supported by committee in -- during the clause-by-clause review.
What this essentially does is add a few items to the list of information that is to be made public, and those are the forest harvesting agreements, and permits and licenses that would be issued for nonpersonal use.
We heard from the department that they didn't want all the permits and licenses issued because there was a lot for personal use, so we came back and said well, let's just -- we won't ask for those to be made public. We'll just ask for other kinds of permits and licenses to be made public. So that's the purpose for adding that one.
And on the forest harvesting agreements, I think the rationale from committee -- and I certainly supported this -- was that these are important agreements where we're giving rights to harvest lumber or timber to private interests, maybe even Indigenous economic development corporations, whatever, and because this is, you know, an agreement for harvesting that the public should probably know what is in that agreement because the government's negotiating isn't giving away those rights to some extent. At the same time, we recognize that there might be some information in those agreements that needs to be kept confidential, and that's the purposes of clause -- the second and third parts of the amendment I'm bringing forward here today. So it's really to expand that list of information that would be required to be made public.
And I think these are reasonable additions, and I think they're consistent with the kind of approach that was used in the last Assembly to create, in some cases very extensive public registries under the Mineral Resources Act, under the Public Land Act a lot more information is being made public. The public -- or sorry, the Protected Areas Act as well also has an extensive list of items that are being included on a public registry. So that's the purpose in bringing this forward, is to expand that list in the interest of transparency and accountability. And the argument might be made that this could happen later through regulations but I'm of the view that it should actually appear in the act because there's no certainty that it will actually happen in the regulations. Thanks, Madam Chair.