Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses. I've learned quite a bit today.
Mr. Ricketts, I wanted to start with you. I'm from Halifax, and there's this gardener for HRM, the Halifax Regional Municipality, David McLearn, and he, unbeknownst to anyone, started replacing flowers with vegetables in the city gardens—sort of a guerrilla gardener—and then he'd harvest these vegetables and bring them to Hope Cottage, which is one of the soup kitchens.
He didn't get permission and he did it for a few years before anyone noticed. Now he is getting all kinds of awards for how innovative he has been, and the city holds him up as a hero. I'm sure if they had found out a couple years earlier they probably would have stopped it from happening.
I tell that story because I think it illustrates how government is often behind community when it comes to these innovative initiatives. I think about the fact that there is an opportunity here for the federal government to promote or support these kinds of initiatives.
I'm not asking a question here about creating new money for something like urban gardens, but when we have federal funding, can you think of ways that we could maybe innovatively consider federal funding so that it could support projects like this? For example, we have had some people at committee who discussed how changing the way the infrastructure money is granted and including urban conservation in infrastructure funding might help. Can you see ways that the federal government could help the work that you're doing in that way, using the funding that's available?