Under the federal regulatory process, departments, at the outset, when they're getting ready to do a regulation, go through what's called a triage of the proposal. During that process they examine the environmental, economic, and social impacts. On the basis of pre-established criteria, that indicates to the regulatory department the extent to which the cost benefit should be done. For example, it identifies the major areas of risk.
It also determines the level of significance of the regulations. If you had a very low-impact regulation, and the example we heard before is if, for example, the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations identified an inconsistency between the English and the French, if that kind of amendment comes forward, there's little point in prepublishing it for 90 days for a mandatory prepublication period since it's really corrective in nature. Whereas, we talked about the example of the DOT-111 cars; that is definitely a significant regulation and one that would be prepublished.
The length of time it would be prepublished in the future, under the cabinet directive, would be determined by the significance of the proposal. In fact, cabinet could elect to prepublish something for more than 90 days. They could say that they want this out there for six months, and they want people to really have a good look at this.
But not all regulations are equal. Many of them are merely administrative in nature. People wouldn't even look at them twice in the Canada Gazette , part I, but there are criteria to determine that in the regulatory process.