Thank you for the question.
As I stated, it was a privilege and an honour to be appointed by the Prime Minister to be the chair, the president, of the Conference of the Parties to Kyoto. This has been an excellent experience, in terms of working with our partners, because as I indicated to you, we are not the only country that is facing challenges in meeting our greenhouse gas targets set under the Kyoto Protocol. We have a number of countries, and I believe it's around fifteen countries now, that are not on track to meeting their targets. What has come out of that, as a consequence, is a very strong consensus that we need to start moving forward to talk about what those challenges are, how we can face them, and what kinds of solutions we can use to address those.
Another thing that has come out of this exercise is that non-Kyoto parties are also interested in starting to dialogue with us and with other countries on this issue, namely Australia and the United States.
The other issue that's come out of this, of course, is that developing countries do not have any targets under Kyoto. China and India, for instance, are considered developing countries under the Kyoto Protocol, so another part of the discussion has become how will developing countries like China and India start to contribute to make reductions, because of course the United States, China, and India, are responsible for the largest percentage of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
I think the important thing that has happened is that we have begun a dialogue on the international stage that was set in motion by Canada raising the profile of the challenge of meeting the first-term target, about how we are going to address these issues moving into the second period of commitment. So it has been an excellent experience for Canada. But what has come out of it for us, obviously, as a government is the need to put in place, as other countries have that have been successful in reaching their Kyoto commitments, a strong domestic agenda, and that's what Canada's clean air act will do.