I'll say a couple of words first.
I was going to be the presenter, and then I realized to my horror that I was to talk about impacts and adaptation and Jim Bruce was going to be sitting next to me. So Quentin got packed onto an airplane this morning in a panic, so he could maybe add some supplemental comments to this rather great gentleman next to me.
My first comment is that you should believe everything you just heard. You're into this issue of how do you weigh the costs of action against inaction. It's a question of how much, when, and it's a dilemma, a “damned if you do and damned if you don't” situation that we've got ourselves into. Had we started twenty years ago, we might not be in such a bad predicament, but we're in it.
Part of my background...I have been in government most of my career, twenty years out of my thirty-some-odd years of being around, and I have been the manager of policy for the Ontario ministries of Environment and Energy. I've been an executive director of a round table in Ontario. I was on the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council when Bob Page was the chair many years ago. Pollution Probe's position on a whole bunch of policy or relevant areas.... So we're on the board of BIOCAP Canada, which Bob chairs; we're on the board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada; we're on advisory panels to commissioners of environment, both Ontario and federally; we're on the ADM steering committee on energy efficiency under the Council of Energy Ministers; we're at the energy sector sustainability table; and so on.
I'm trying to illustrate that we are very much engaged in a multi-stakeholder way with industry, governments, NGOs, health groups, and others. We're quite happy to talk about policy and litigation, although we understood that the primary emphasis of what we're going to talk about, and Quentin will talk about, is on the impact side and some of the costs of inaction.
I won't go any further than that, other than to pass to Quentin to supplement, if he can, some of the interesting stuff we just heard from Jim.