Thank you for that question.
I don't have a legal background in this area. I've been a party to and a part of consultation efforts over the years. In terms of environmental assessments and layers of regulations, there is an environmental review followed by water licensing and permitting. The process sometimes becomes overly technical for a public consultation, but with the aid of technical expertise combined with public and traditional knowledge and indigenous science, somewhere within a period of six months to two years people are able to understand and grasp and move forward on a proposed development.
So consultation happens during that period, and when an aboriginal government steps up and really takes that responsibility on themselves as well, we see really good efforts at consultation and really excellent efforts by companies and by governments.
I think currently the status in the north is that there's fairly good consultation on critical issues, but a couple of things are required. First of all, intervenor funding is required, and that only comes to aboriginal governments if there's a certain kind of process invoked, which is environmental impact review.
For example, Gahcho Kué, proposed by De Beers, has environmental impact review funding, and aboriginal governments have access to funding. Environmental assessment, a lower threshold of review, has no funding, so you're on your own.
If you manage to negotiate an agreement with the developer to get funding, then you have adequate funding to hire technical expertise to crunch through information and make sense of it.
There are so many diverse parties in the north that often the funding gets split into so many different fractions that it's not enough to make a big impact. It's hard to get all of the authorities to work together to actually engage and work with one or two experts, rather than 15 or 20, which often happens.
The consultation that happens when there's intervenor funding and adequate time can be quite good.