One question came in from the South Okanagan Similkameen environment committee—namely, how does Canada ensure that its international commitments under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity are upheld in the course of its work to carry out the national conservation plan and complementary legislation, regulations, or policy processes? That's a question that's put forward, and I think that's one of the closing statements on that.
Just based on my particular experience over the years, and working on this particular file, it goes right down to this comment that came out of the national conservation plan, that we should “use the right tools in the right situations so that environmental and economic benefits and burdens are distributed fairly to ensure positive environmental and economic outcomes”.
There are a lot of examples out there where this has not been done and the outcome has been detrimental to first nations and to the environment. I think there needs to be a lot more concentration on that. We need to start looking at how we can actually use those right tools in the right situations. They could be regulatory. They could be cooperative. There are all types of tools, but we need to work collectively to identify those tools.
As a closing statement, then, that's one I'd like to underline.