Let me just try to wrap your head around this. In Canada we have 53 aboriginal languages. We have seven language families. In all of Europe there's one language family.
There's a huge diversity of aboriginal people across the land, just as there's a huge diversity in our ecoregions across the land. Freshwater, saltwater, mountain ranges, plains--any sort of thing you can think of around the world, we have it in Canada.
Aboriginal peoples are, as the French say, the autochtone, of the land. That diversity is very hard to.... You know, you can't just come up and say here is the aboriginal voice or the aboriginal view on this issue. There is no such thing. There are many, many views across the land.
Six members of a national aboriginal committee on species at risk have a very tough time, when they're scattered all across the land, to come together to learn from each of those communities what the issues are. They're not really supported by any sort of secretariat. Environment Canada controls every small little aspect of what that committee does. They're not really given the tools.
The traditional knowledge subcommittee of COSEWIC is the same thing. You have 10 people doing the work, or 12 people doing the work, the same amount of workload that all the other scientists on COSEWIC are doing. Again, they have a secretariat. They have one-and-a-half people versus COSEWIC, which has hundreds and hundreds of scientists and research documents behind them.
It's the tools. As we said, the act is well written. There are spots where we can be involved in the act; it's having those tools to actually be involved in the act.
It's going to be a long road. There's a lot more that needs to be done in order to get there; yes, I agree.