Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to come back to your committee. My office tells me I was here last November, and it feels like a long time since we've talked to you.
As you know, I have Rob and Peter with me today. The three of us have been working closely on, now, over 18 projects and 10 strategies. I think that, when I was here last, there were fewer by quite a few. We can answer a lot of questions on projects, on our processes and on some of the interesting work that we're pulling together under the Building Canada Act.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on my opening comments, because I know you have a number of questions. I will say just that our portfolio is around $200 billion, and we're evaluating all the projects. Many of them are considered referred projects, so they're really not under the Building Canada Act. However, we're working with those proponents to ensure that we can help them with regulatory and financing and to see how to move them through the system.
Since I talked to you last, we had five projects. We now have four projects that we're looking to list under our act. Of course, once you are listed under the act, there is then a regulatory process to issue a conditions document. As you know, we have one PONI; this, of course, is the Pacific link pipeline, which was listed on October 1. We can talk about how we expect the process to look as we go from the listing to the conditions phase.
The four projects that we're currently evaluating are the Mackenzie Valley highway, Roberts Bank terminal two, Grays Bay port and road, and the NWMO deep geological repository. We can answer questions about what our process looks like for evaluating projects and determining whether they should be listed.
You should know that it's the government that asks us to evaluate a project for the potential for listing. This does not guarantee that you get listed. There's a very extensive process that we undertake, which includes evaluating a project in terms of its business case, its economic impact and its execution. Then we also evaluate the national interest factors that are listed under the act, and we can add other factors as well. We can get into any level of detail that you'd want to know about there, in terms of how we do that process.
When I was with you last, we probably had about 20 people; we now have 200 people working on these projects. They work in first nations consultation, regulatory, financial evaluation, economic evaluation, and they have practices that cut across energy, transportation, communications and many other sectors. We have a good group of people who can now evaluate the work we're doing, and our evaluations also include independent third party studies.
Perhaps the most important work we do is that we try to figure out how to determine whether the balance of factors satisfies the criteria to make a project a PONI. Once we've done that, we figure out how to make sure, as we go through to the conditions phase, that we've evaluated all the issues associated with first nations' rights and title under section 35, as well as all the environmental factors. It takes a lot of coordination among our office, the proponent, indigenous communities and environmental communities, as well as the departments in federal and provincial governments, to ensure that as we're evaluating and considering the projects, we've considered them on all fronts. Fundamentally, if we do, in the end, permit a project, we would list all of those factors that we have considered in the final conditions document.
There's a lot to talk about. I'm very interested in your questions. I'll take questions, as will Peter and Rob. We're looking forward to the discussion today.
Thank you.