I'll take that, thank you.
Thank you for the question. Actually we have a very interesting governance structure at the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission. We have a council of governors, an 18-member, multi-jurisdictional, tripartite group, and those 18 members represent every single province and territory across Canada, as well as stakeholders such as organized labour, chemical suppliers, and employers.
Our ability to engage with stakeholders is significantly enhanced by having this oversight body, and in fact our council is the body that makes the strategic policy recommendations to the Minister of Health, allowing our agency to remain independent.
It's a very interesting construct, and it was birthed from the original system that we were created from, and that is the workplace hazardous materials information system. That is a hazard communications system--federal, provincial, and territorial--that is all about making sure that workers have the information they need to work with hazardous materials in the workplace, making sure they have accurate and complete information.
When we look at how we come into that, we are in fact the trade secret mechanism, so people come to us when they want to be exempted from the requirement to disclose all of their information.
WHMIS is all about tripartite consultation with stakeholders. It was created as one of the only, I think, consensus-based projects, and it's something that I think government got right in terms of creating the system where they have provinces that do their part of the work, in a complementary fashion, the feds do their part of the work in terms of supplier requirements, and then the commission is a cornerstone that does the provincial work, the territorial work, and the federal work in terms of trade secret inspection.
For all those reasons, our level of stakeholder engagement is pretty intense. In fact, we just met with our council a couple of weeks ago and again tried to make sure there's that interactiveness that makes sure we're grounded. The reason we were created was to be an agency that would serve and protect stakeholders. So I find that having this council has been a very interesting experience, but also one that keeps us grounded as to why we are here; it keeps us relevant.