Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to present before you today.
I'm Rachel Plotkin, with the David Suzuki Foundation.
On the screen before you are Keith Ferguson, staff lawyer for Ecojustice, and Susan Pinkus, scientist for Ecojustice.
As the chair mentioned, Keith and I will be going back and forth delivering the presentation.
Our four organizations—the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Environmental Defence, and Nature Canada--submitted a comprehensive written brief to you in July 2009. We submitted an update to that brief to you last week. As well, hopefully you have before you the deck from which we're going to be making our presentation today.
Three of our organizations are also members of SARAC, and we helped draft the documents you received from SARAC, which represent the first stage of industry/NGO collaboration to assist you with your review.
We do hope that further collaboration will allow us to provide you with an additional collaborative brief.
Please note that throughout our presentation, when we say “scientific”, we mean western science, aboriginal traditional knowledge, and community knowledge on the biology of a species.
If you're following your deck, on the second deck there is a slide is entitled “General consensus: SARA shortcomings”. As you have heard, implementation of SARA, to date, has been disappointing. The good news, however, is that we do believe that things are starting to improve on some fronts.
I will now hand over to Keith, who is going to walk you through some of these recommendations.