Mr. Chair, I have two points on that.
Yes, the COSEWIC does consider the status of the species globally. They are restricted to assessing just the Canadian population, but they do consider, particularly more in their priority setting, the global population of that species.
On the issue of populations or subpopulations or subunits, that's actually one of the interesting things that came out of the COSEWIC polar bear assessment. Canada does consider that it has 13 subunits and had been considering those as subpopulations. However, given the additional work that was done in this recent COSEWIC assessment along with the traditional aboriginal knowledge, COSEWIC has assessed that as one population. So they looked at the status and the health of the population overall, as opposed to looking at those subunits, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature has done.