Thank you so much for coming today.
I think I speak on behalf of the entire committee—at least I hope I do—in saying that we are very excited to get started on this study. It's an issue of importance to many Canadians. I think it's one we can find a lot of common ground on.
The reason we wanted to bring you out today was because we want, as a group, to develop a really good structure or a call for witness feedback, so the output of this study allows the minister to embark on a robust consultation process, etc. Our government members have met, and we were kicking around some ideas on what that structure would look like and some of the areas we could get witnesses to comment on. Some of the things we thought about including would be commenting on purpose, why have an NCP, some of the goals the NCP should achieve, and some guiding principles.
What came out of the round table was a set of guiding principles for the plan and some conservation areas of focus: What, as a government, should we be focusing on with regard to conservation priorities, outcomes, or success metrics that the plan could focus on or hope to achieve? What would be the implementation strategies? And then there would be some recommendations for the minister on embarking on a formal consultation process once this information has been collated by committee. Again, this was sort of a high-level brainstorming on some areas.
I was hoping maybe you could comment on that scope and give me your thoughts, based on the work you've done to date, on any other areas we should include and whether there's stuff in there that maybe isn't relevant, etc.