Thank you for your question.
At the time of the creation of the major projects management office it was clear that the current regulatory system just wasn't working well as a system, as my colleague, Jim Clarke, outlined in his presentation.
Over the course of a number of decades a number of regulations and pieces of legislation were put in place for well-intended purposes, but there was very little regard as to how that framework interacted as a system impacting major projects. There were a number of different pieces of legislation, but there was nobody really put in place to look at how those pieces of legislation and regulation interacted together and how they form as a system.
When the major projects management office was created it was really intended to pull together federal regulatory departments and agencies that had responsibilities and a mandate for working on issues related to major projects. It was to ensure that we were taking a whole-of-government approach and looking at issues in a collective way so that we could have a Government of Canada perspective on how to manage these issues rather than looking at a piecemeal approach and looking at issues from an individual departmental mandate, and not really rowing in the same direction in terms of these important projects going forward.
We had a dual purpose in setting up the office. First and foremost, this was ensuring that those individual projects that were moving through the process at any given time were moving forward as efficiently and effectively as possible while at the same time working with our colleagues in other federal regulatory departments and agencies to take a holistic look at the system and how it worked together and to develop options and opportunities for improving that framework going forward.