Thank you for the question.
At Natural Resources Canada we have been working for the last few years on a major effort to improve the performance of the federal government's regulatory process. That has been undertaken through our major projects management office. It's a very small office, but it works very much in applying a more stringent project management approach with all of the regulatory agencies across the government, including our own, because we have a regulatory role at NRCan as well.
We had two mandates for that MPMO. One was to do just that--to apply a much rigorous project management approach. The second was to become a focal point within the Government of Canada for looking at how we could make some improvements to the way all our regulations and legislation work.
One thing announced in this recent budget was a move to have the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and office enter into a memorandum of understanding--for instance, with the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission--to ensure that if there is one project, there is one assessment.
That's where we want to move to enable the governments collectively to reduce duplication, particularly in the role of agencies. There have been calls on the part of a number of provincial governments to move toward that very same kind of approach. We've had some early opportunities with the Government of B.C. to have an agreement to substitute the provincial processes for the actual CEAA review in the federal government.
Most notably, there was the Highway 37 transmission line in northwest B.C. There is an MOU between Transport Canada and the Province of B.C. to ensure that we will actually use the environmental assessment and not require a duplicate assessment at the federal level. That is paving the way and giving us some pilots that we can study and analyze to see what the potential would be to move toward the concept of one project, one assessment. We are trying to reduce the number of agencies and the overhead on that front.