Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that Bill 39 be amended by adding the following immediately preceding the heading preceding section 23:
Review of Act
22.2 (1) This act must be reviewed by the Minister within 18 months after the commencement of the 20th Legislative Assembly.
(2) the Minister shall table in the Legislative Assembly a report on the results of a review conducted under subsection (1) at the earliest opportunity.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. The motion is in order. To the motion. Mr. O'Reilly.
Thanks, Mr. Chair. In my remarks earlier I mentioned that this bill has been in place for 29 years. It is not very well-used. What has happened in those 29 years is that the concept of environmental rights has evolved. I mentioned how 149 of 193 countries in the world now have constitutional recognition of environmental rights in one form or another. Unfortunately, Canada is not one of those countries.
I also talked about how expectations were raised by the department during the public consultations of the bill around matters like definitions of a right to healthy environment, public trust, and so on. That would certainly, in the eyes of some of the people who appeared before the standing committee, create an expectation that there might be more of a rights-based approach to environmental rights in this bill. That is not really what we got, but certainly, around the world, this is an area of evolving law, and a lot of jurisdictions are moving towards this environmental rights-based approach.
Given that this bill has only very infrequently, only once, ever been reviewed, this is an area of evolving law that some things were promised and perhaps not delivered, committee felt, or at least I felt, that it would be important to put a checkpoint in the future where there could be some reconsideration of the review of the bill or the act and its implementation to allow for a considered review of it and see if further improvements could be made.
This would require a review in 2025, six years down the road. It is a one-time review, all at the Minister's discretion, and would require that the Minister table a report in the House. This doesn't have to be a huge onerous exercise, maybe even not as onerous as the exercise that the department went through in proposing the changes in what is before us.
As a one-time review in this area of evolving law, I would hope that Members would see fit to agree that this is something reasonable to insert into the bill.
Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. To the motion. Mr. Testart.
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.
Thank you, Mr. Testart. Next, we have Mr. Nakimayak.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. We don't know what the priorities of this government are going to be or who is going to be here in five or six years. Mind you, we haven't even moved on to the next government. We have gone through mid-term reviews during a very busy time at this Assembly and noticing other Assemblies going through the same thing. We have four years to conduct our work.
At the same time, too, we are putting this on a government who will likely have very different priorities. Our situation with climate change and all that will be totally different then. I wouldn't say I guarantee, but I am sure that something like this will come up during those times in some significant cases with climate change and events around our territory with wildfires and all that.
I think that this is just putting on extra work to a government down the road, and I think that, from my point of view, Members or committees can decide to pull this up if they want to during that Assembly for that sake, knowing that it will get busier and busier as legislators, as MLAs representing our regions. I don't support this. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Nakimayak. Next we have Mr. McNeely.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I can't support this bill for various reasons, but I will just highlight, looking at the bill here, the introduction to the bill. "Bill 39, Environmental Rights Act, recognizes the right to protect the integrity, biological diversity, and productivity of the ecosystems in the Northwest Territories and to provide residents with the tools and processes needed to ensure these rights are protected by the GNWT."
As my previous colleague mentioned, adding layers would, at the end, make it cumbersome. I am very fond of seeing practical exercises or practical examples which really give you confidence the paperwork and the legislation that we see in this building being practised and implemented.
I am on the mailing list for the Deline Got'ine Government, and I just recently, earlier today, got a compliment brief report through a video of the Deline Got'ine Government that initiated the Deline 2019 Kids' Eagle Workshop held out on the land for a week. There was private. There were corporate sponsorships, including ENR contributing to that initiative.
It is working over there. I am seeing it on paper here. That is what I really love about this job. When you apply your resources, led by regulation and the principles of legislation to do what is best in protection as stewards of our land. Given something that is already working, I would rather not add more layers of bureaucracy to that already-working system. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. McNeely. Any further questions committee? Mr. O'Reilly.
Thanks, Mr. Chair. I am disappointed that the Minister didn't see fit to respond for the record on the department's position. This is not about adding extra layers. This about adding a one-time review six years into the future on a bill that has been reviewed once in 29 years. It is about ensuring that we keep environmental rights up to standards that our citizens expect, ensuring that we consider whether we have adopted best practices or not. This is not about creating extra work. It is about providing a checkpoint.
Committee has spent a lot of time reviewing other bills where we have actually built in reviews. Cannabis Bill, something brand new, we built in a mandatory review. Access to Information and Protection of Privacy, built in a mandatory five-year review. This is an area that is evolving, as well. This is a bill that can and perhaps should have been a lot better. Again, I am disappointed that the Minister didn't see fit to provide the departmental response, Cabinet's response on this. I think I know where it is going. Mr. Chair, I would request a recorded vote. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. To the motion.
Question.
