This is what I'm leading to for my second point. We have an aboriginal traditional knowledge, or ATK, subcommittee. It was established in 2001. It was only in 2007 that the ministerial appointments to the subcommittee were made. Since then, the subcommittee has made extraordinary progress, in my mind, to develop a protocol by which ATK would be obtained and incorporated in status reports.
It's taken a while in part because in order to do that across the country, one requires approval, for example, from aboriginal elders. COSEWIC has sponsored and held three elders workshops to date. There will be a fourth. We hope by November of this year to have a protocol by which ATK can be obtained for any species.
That's not to say that we have not obtained it to date. We have for the polar bear, as one good example, for which a secondary contract was let to obtain ATK specifically for the polar bear, and we have done that on other occasions as well. We're currently doing it for the Dolly Varden. We're currently doing it for Atlantic salmon and woodland caribou. We have a precedent for doing that on a piecemeal basis, by means of gathering ATK for the purpose of assessing a particular species. What I was describing to you earlier is the development, and hopefully the acceptance, of a protocol that could be applied to any species.