Certainly. Let's start with access to information. At the current time, if you're a Canadian citizen looking for information, it's very difficult. I'm purportedly an expert in environmental law and I find it hard to find information about various Canadian environmental law policy initiatives. There are different websites. There's the chemicals management plan website. There's the Canadian environmental assessment website. There's a species at risk public registry.
What Ontario has done under its Environmental Bill of Rights has worked very well. It has created one-stop shopping through the creation of an electronic online environmental registry where all of the information is available in one place. You simply plug in a search term and, voila, you have the information you're looking for. I think that would be probably the single most useful thing we could do in terms of citizen access to information.
In terms of public participation, there are many things that we could do to improve that. One is that there are now, as a result of legislative changes by the previous government, unprecedented barriers to public participation in important environmental processes under the National Energy Board Act and under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Citizen participation is no longer open to the public. You have to fill out application forms online and then have someone judge whether you're eligible to participate.
Then there are access to justice issues. It's clear that some of the provisions we have in Canada, like the environmental protection action under CEPA, don't work. Coming up with creative ways to grant access to judicial and administrative remedies is really important. I think we can put all sorts of creative elements in there.
I really love the idea that comes from the Philippines, that in any environmental litigation there has to be a mandatory period of mediation between the parties to see if the issues can be resolved before they go through that tortuous court process.
I'll include a whole bunch of recommendations in my brief about access to information, public participation, and access to justice.