I'm happy to do that. I think the minister alluded to some of this in his comments, but I'll be as concrete as I can be.
One caveat up front is something we're starting up. We've just formed the office and it's out moving, so I think over time we'll see many more concrete results than we've had up until now, but I'll tell you what we've done out of the starting block.
First off, we did name a senior official out there to head up the office whose primary job is really to make sure that we are having good engagement and dialogue with first nations and with the provincial government in B.C. on projects that are in play. As you know, there are a number of them out there, whether it's liquefied natural gas projects that proponents are coming forward with, whether it's pipelines...There is actually quite a bit of activity on the west coast. A lot of that activity directly implicates first nations, whether they're on the route of a pipeline or they're located near where a LNG terminal is going to be located, or they're near where a gas discovery is going to be made. There's a lot of interest and concern among first nations on this development. I would say job number one for this office and for that person, Mike Henderson, who's heading it up, is to make sure that we're engaging with first nations early on in the process and having a good dialogue outside of the formal environmental assessment process. There's always an opportunity for communities and people to be engaged through the formal mechanism, but what this office is trying to do is to set up a mechanism whereby we can have those exchanges and learn from each other outside of that process.
The two tangible things I would mention is that we have started up, although it's not off and running yet, a tripartite process to look at a range of issues. That's tripartite with the first nations, with the province, and with ourselves, because one of the issues that we can run into is when a project comes forward, there are different dialogues going on with different entities. We've tried to pull them together, get us all around the table so we can understand the implications of the project, talk through some of the issues, and see what some of the solutions might be. That's one.
The second, which again will be part of this tripartite process, is really a study to figure out how we best assess cumulative impacts of projects. That's one of the things that's been of interest to first nations in a number of projects. We need to work together with our provincial colleagues, federally ourselves, and with the first nations to figure out how we should assess that, how to gather that information, and a lot of this is monitoring baseline information. How do we effectively gather that so it can inform future projects going forward?
Those would be two of the more concrete things we're working on in addition to generally being present, making sure we're having discussions that people want to have on these projects, and facilitating it so that everybody feels a little more like a partner in the project.