Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses for being with us today.
We had a fascinating day yesterday, touring sites on Vancouver Island of stream restoration and various projects. British Columbia salmon are iconic here, and on Vancouver Island we had a lot of habitat destruction because of the interaction of humans with their environment. We saw some great examples of restoration yesterday.
Your organizations, both the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Trout Unlimited, have been big time involved in working with local groups, habitat enhancement societies, various agencies such as B.C. Conservation Foundation—with us yesterday—and Streamkeepers, organizations like that. I think Dr. Riddell mentioned some 350 organizations that the Pacific Salmon Foundation has worked with.
Yesterday we saw the Millstone River in an urban area of Nanaimo and the great work that has been done. There are two kilometres of spawning channel through a park that now has a whole community's support behind it, with children helping to see that salmon come up through the stream, connecting the watershed there with very promising returns.
I wanted to just take us back up to where we were yesterday, for the record, and that's Nile Creek, one of the other projects we saw. Nile Creek restoration has been going for a number of years and has been described by many as a model of stream restoration.
I just wonder, Dr. Riddell, if you'd take a moment to describe what makes that particular project what many consider to be a model for stream bed restoration.