All right.
Thank you very much. I also want to thank my deputy, Stephen Lucas, and also Ron Hallman, the president of CEAA. They've done an amazing job.
We knew when we came in as a government that we needed to rebuild trust in our environmental assessment system. We heard that from environmentalists and from indigenous peoples and from Canadians. We also heard that from industry, because it was impeding trust, which meant that it was much more challenging for good projects to go ahead, so that's exactly what we've done in the proposed legislation—rebuilt trust. Rebuilding trust means that we have made clear that the views of Canadians and the views of communities will be heard. There will be no standing test so that if you have concerns, you will have your opportunity to make them clear.
Reconciliation is a top priority for our government. We need to be working in partnership with indigenous peoples, and that starts at the very beginning. That starts in a new early engagement phase and it goes all the way through monitoring of projects. Indigenous traditional knowledge is a must-have, not just a nice-to-have.
We've moved from looking at just the environmental factors to doing a broader impact assessment test that will look at factors like the social impacts, the health impacts, and the economic impacts of projects, as well as, of course, the environmental impacts. We realize this is actually going to be better, because when we do this, we will be able to build trust in Canadians that we are making decisions based on robust science, that we are listening to communities, that we are working in partnership with indigenous peoples, and at the same time that we are making sure that good projects go ahead in a timely way.
As part of that, we've also looked at how we can ensure that we do more work in the front end, where we will give more certainty to businesses by looking at how we work with provinces so that we aren't duplicating efforts and making it more difficult for proponents, and also that we're giving them guidance about how to consult with indigenous peoples and about the permitting process.