I'll start with what we do. As was mentioned a couple of times already, it's an assessment of impact. It's not just of the environment. It's social, health and economic impacts as well.
In terms of the environment focus, we essentially look at anything related to the project that is of interest to those who are engaging in that process. The early planning phase is really the key to that. We will have a public, transparent process where communities, stakeholders and indigenous groups can identify those things that are of interest or concern to them. Traditionally, it's been our looking at the significant adverse environmental effects, but there's also the possibility and obligation under the new act for us to be looking at positive effects.
We look at all of the environmental effects in federal jurisdiction. That would include things like biodiversity, species at risk, climate change issues and water issues—you name it. It's something that we've probably heard in an assessment and have done analytics around.
As Mr. Hubbard mentioned, we rely heavily on other federal departments' in expertise. Where we don't have expertise in house, within the federal government, we're also able to reach outside and work with other academics or experts. There's also a new set of provisions under the act that allows us to reach outside and have external technical reviews as a tool, where there's uncertainty on the science associated with some of those environmental or other areas. Those external technical reviews will basically do a rapid response review of the literature and the science and provide information where there's uncertainty about how analysis should be undertaken.