Thank you, Madam Chair. Public engagement took place from November 22nd, 2022 to January of 2023. And the public engagement input was considered by the technical working group. Much of the input that is being discussed here today, it was deemed valuable and to be looked at while regulation development was occurring. So I just want to be clear that we welcome public engagement and much of the public engagement was more geared towards regulations, which makes sense, because it's from people who are actively going to be dealing with some of the things that come from this Act.
I think it's really important to communicate here that the GNWT has a broad policy based approach on determining how and to what degree the public is engaged on regulations. And this approach includes a commitment to conduct public engagement as part of the normal course of their development. Potential exceptions could include emergency orders, minor corrections to existing regulations, names or title changes, and consequential amendments required by changes to other legislation. Even with an exception to public engagement for emergency orders, there could be unacceptable delays from a process to apply the exception. This could occur, for example, if the Minister's role to waive the requirement -- if it is the Minister's role to waive the requirement for public engagement. The bill delegates the exercise of emergency powers related to wildfires to the forest superintendent and any changes to that, or reassigning that, would cause delays.
Further, adding separate requirements for engagement into individual Acts runs the risk that public engagement requirements will differ for different Acts, fail to evolve with technology, and lead to different approaches and potential confusion across different acts.
The Forest Act cannot come into force without the regulations. The regulations will be developed with the Intergovernmental Council secretariat, and there will be various stages where the public and other stakeholders may provide input. Thank you, Madam Chair.