Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Josée Touchette, and I am the Chief Operating Officer of the National Energy Board.
I am joined today by Sandy Lapointe, the NEB's Executive Vice President, Regulatory, and Dr. Robert Steedman, our Chief Environment Officer.
Let me offer a quick overview of the NEB, because I guess we're going to be the subject of a few questions.
The NEB is an independent regulator of pipelines, energy development, and trade. It has three key roles: adjudicating energy projects, supporting the safety of Canadians and the environment through oversight, and engaging Canadians on energy information. As my colleague indicated, the NEB reports to Parliament through the Minister of Natural Resources.
Canadians know us mainly for the hearings that we conduct on the development of energy infrastructure. But we regulate that infrastructure over its entire life cycle, from project proposal, to construction and operation, through to abandonment.
We oversee 73,000 kilometres of pipelines. That's nearly enough to wrap around the earth twice. We also oversee 1,400 kilometres of power lines, which is about the distance from Yellowknife to Regina.
Our annual budget for 2015-16 is $91 million, 37% of which is temporary, including roughly $12 million for safety. We cost-recover 95% of this from the companies that we regulate.
In my role as chief operating officer, I run the day-to-day business of the organization. I report to Peter Watson, in his role as CEO.
About 18 months ago, Peter Watson was appointed chair and CEO. I joined about six months later.
When we began to work at the board, we were already aware that the NEB needed to change to respond to a growing issue of public trust. We quickly learned that the 475 NEB staff are well qualified, talented, and dedicated, but it was evident that the energy and environment discussion in Canada had changed dramatically over a short period of time and that the NEB was not prepared. Notably, there were systemic deficiencies in our IT and information management processes that were inhibiting our ability to be transparent and to show Canadians that we are on the job of keeping pipelines safe every single day.
Therefore, we were not surprised when the commissioner noted those deficiencies. We immediately embarked on an aggressive agenda of modernization that is aligned with our three strategic priorities, namely, regulatory excellence, safety, and engaging Canadians, and we began to implement changes.
First, we made changes to our leadership team. Of the 10 most senior staff members in the organization, six are either new or new in their positions. We achieved key milestones to make our oversight work more robust, to improve our IM/IT capabilities, to make information more transparent, and to better engage with Canadians.
Canadians can now find an interactive map of all pipeline incidents on our website. Our inspection reports and our evaluations of emergency exercises conducted by pipeline companies are now posted online. In the spring of 2015, we launched a public consultation on the transparency of pipeline emergency management information, and in the next few weeks we'll outline how pipeline companies will post their energy procedure manuals online.
In response to the audit, we've developed two information management tools that better enable our systems to talk to each other—to use the words of the commissioner—and as promised to the minister in a letter dated February 4, we are posting on our website all 2,869 pipeline approval conditions that have been issued since January, 2010, along with the associated compliance information.
The audit confirmed our diagnostic and helped guide the changes we are undertaking that will, we believe, lead to more robust oversight, greater transparency and, we trust, greater public confidence and engagement in the decisions of the board.
Thank you. I look forward to the committee's questions.