In terms of public participation under the act, we have mandatory public comment periods at critical points, both on the risk assessment side, as well as on the risk management side. Typically, those are implemented or operationalized as 60-day public comment periods.
We get the comments in, consider them, adjust our products as necessary, and provide a summary of the public comment as well as a response. That is made available on the website.
Beyond those official public comment periods, we actually have much more on the go. Whenever we're undertaking assessments or thinking about undertaking a certain tranche of assessments, we have stakeholder information sessions in terms of here's what we're thinking, these are the substances, these are the approaches, this is how we plan on grouping these substances, and these are some of the assessment methodologies that we're considering. We get some input from the stakeholders, consider it, and come back to them. There is a lot of back and forth.
Once we've identified what our framework is, we will move forward at that point in time, saying, “Okay, here's what we're doing. These are the substances.” We then officially engage stakeholders with those substances. Stakeholders could be either from an NGO side, or from an industry side, so there's a lot of early engagement even before we generally start official information gathering. So before we issue a section 71 notice under the act, we will have that very early engagement.
From that point on, there is an incredible amount of back and forth on some of these substances. Some have more, some have less, but there is a lot of stakeholder engagement.
As I mentioned in the presentation, we have the CMP stakeholder advisory council that consists right now of 23 members—a broad mix of stakeholders who provide us with a range of advice on the implementation of the CMP.
Also associated with this is a biannual publication. By biannual, I mean every six months. A lot of stakeholders have said, “You're doing an incredible amount of work, but it's buried somewhere on this chemical substances website. Is there some way that you could quickly pull together a 10-page document that describes what you've done in the last six months and what you plan on doing in the coming six months?” So we've pulled that together. It goes out generally in June and December, plus or minus a month. It really provides stakeholders with that update.
We generally receive positive feedback from them. As I said, that publication is something that was implemented as a result of stakeholder requests, so we definitely work with stakeholders on a lot of this.