Newly-appointed Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said the federal government is committed to seeing the Trans Mountain expansion project through to completion.

“It’s already being built. Maybe we need to do a better job of telling that story,” McKenna said in an interview Thursday with BNN Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman.

She said while the pipeline isn’t one of the projects in her portfolio, she believes it’s “incredibly important.”

But McKenna, who served as environment and climate change minister until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s second-term cabinet shuffle last week, said Canada’s need to get its natural resources to market should be balanced with efforts to curb any further ecological damage.

“It will come as no surprise to anyone that I care greatly about making sure we do that in a sustainable way and we also meet our climate targets,” she said.

She added that climate change poses a significant risk to long-term infrastructure projects.

“If we don’t think about climate change as we build for the next 50, a hundred years, there’s huge risk that we have floods, droughts [and] extreme heat. We need to be building in a way that’s resilient.”