Mr. Speaker, natural resources account for about 20% of the country's GDP. Part of the mandate letter from the Prime Minister stated that I was to understand that our prosperity is linked to the natural resource sector.
On the subject of consulting Canadians, I have had the pleasure of hosting round table conversations from Halifax to Vancouver. At these round tables were industry representatives, environmentalists, and indigenous leaders, who were sitting together, sometimes for the first time, listening to each other's points of view. It is remarkable. After two or three hours of such a conversation, they would suddenly start finishing each other's sentences, and that is because the objectives really are common ones. One of the challenges has been to ensure that people are in rooms listening to each other, not only in a small room with 10 or 20 people, but in the rooms of the nation.
That is why we have established a new way of assessing these projects that will require that a consensus be developed. In terms of a sense of public confidence in the regulatory system, we think the best way to do that is to facilitate these kinds of conversations among Canadians from coast to coast to coast.