Thank you very much, Ms. Charlton.
Indeed, I'll be happy to answer that.
I listened to the testimony a couple of days ago from the officials at NRCan around investigation powers. The powers to investigate an incident exist in the act today and are not being amended as a result of this act, insofar as there's going to be one additional change. The one additional change relates to abandoned pipelines. Currently the definition of “pipeline” in the NEB Act doesn't apply to abandoned pipelines. The board's jurisdiction ends when the pipeline has been granted an order to abandon. What this bill did was look through all the different provisions of the bill where the government felt there was a need to have board oversight over abandoned pipelines and added those to the various provisions.
One provision it added the oversight function to was with respect to the ability to do investigations, so we have the ability to conduct investigations into incidents involving pipelines as defined currently under the bill, but also abandoned pipelines.