Sure, yes. The Pembina Institute was one of the founding members of CEMA, the Cumulative Environmental Management Association. We participated in CEMA for eight years and invested a significant amount of time in a number of working groups and on the management committee of CEMA.
We felt that, unfortunately, the approval process continued to undermine the work of CEMA. This was a group that was supposed to set the rules about oil sands development, but the federal and provincial regulators showed they were willing to approve project after project before those rules were in place. CEMA became a parking lot for contentious issues, and it's in many ways a convenient whipping boy to place the blame on the lack of environmental management while they're letting the Alberta and federal governments off the hook.
We felt that continuing to participate in CEMA, until those rules were in place, was actually just exacerbating the situation, so we recommended that if CEMA's going to be allowed to do its work there needs to be a pause on new approvals until CEMA's work is done. The idea of doing the research and talking about environmental management in one room while rubber-stamping project approvals in the other room is not effective oil sands management.