Thanks, Mr. Chair. I did want to take time to respond to a few things that the Minister mentioned in his opening remarks, and then I'd like to ask a couple of lines of questioning, if I can.
I know that we held a lengthy clause-by-clause review the other night. There were a lot of intentions offered by the Minister on some of the language in the bill, but the language itself doesn't really reflect a number of the things that I think the Minister has said, even in his opening remarks here. I'll just pick up on a few of these.
The Minister is right that there was extensive research conducted by the department. It took a long time to get that information out of the department to the committee; in fact, it was not a good working relationship. I had to apply under Access to Information and Protection of Privacy to get some of that information out of the department. I think the relationship did improve over time, but I just continue to contrast that with what happened on the social envelope side of the legislation that I witnessed and saw, and I think it can and should have been a much more collaborative process. Committee tried to work, and we did achieve some compromises.
The Minister talked about how there is going to be some public benefit provided in the bill, and I only wish that the process and the ideas were as clear as they are on the Indigenous government side, in terms of benefit agreements. I do support those, and the Minister knows well my views on those, and I do support provisions from section 52 on, but the public benefits are extremely vague and weak, and it's not why I came to this Legislative Assembly. It's now why, I think, we're all here, to look at the public interest. So I have some ideas to suggest on the public benefits side, as well.
The Minister mentioned that the zones can be created at the request of Indigenous governments. The Minister also has the ability to establish zones on his or her own initiative. I have yet to see anything in writing where Indigenous governments, maybe I missed it, have specifically requested zones. Certainly, the industry submissions I saw, they wanted some clarification of what zones were about and that the prospecting permit process would continue, but I didn't see any specific requests for zones, either.
I'd like to turn, though, to three areas that I'd like to ask some questions about. We've heard some discussion of the royalty review, or some sort of fiscal regime review, that the department seems to have already started, so can someone please outline very clearly what the scope and substance of that review is? Thank you, Mr. Chair.