Thank you very much for all your work on environmental issues through your career.
As you all know, my mandate in the mandate letter is to restore the confidence of Canadians in our environmental assessment process. There are concerns with the changes that were made in CEAA 2012, so we are doing two things.
One is addressing projects that are currently under review. For those projects, we announced interim principles. What is great is that I work very closely with the Minister of Natural Resources. This doesn't always happen in governments, but we are absolutely aligned. Getting our resources to market has to be done in a sustainable way, which means that we need to be working together.
Those principles include ensuring that decisions are made on evidence, facts, and science as well as traditional knowledge; that we have proper consultation with communities; that we engage with indigenous peoples; that we look at upstream greenhouse gas emissions.
That's on the interim process. Now, with the review of our environmental assessment process, we're looking at various options. Obviously, there would be an opportunity for the committee to provide any feedback on what the committee believes building confidence in our environmental process would look like. Legislative changes would come to the committee.
We are still listening to various groups. We've met with indigenous groups, with environmental groups, with business, to try to determine the best way to move forward in a very timely fashion. We understand that we need to be doing this in a timely fashion so that we have a robust, modern environmental assessment process that has the confidence of Canadians.