Thank you very much, and yes.
A good deal of my continuing enlightenment in this area comes from your own experience. I think for me the most telling awareness set in after you showed me satellite pictures of some decades ago, which showed speckles of blue across the Canadian Prairies, and more recent satellite photos that show that in the interests of greater productivity on those lands, those blue areas have been drained and put into production. Of course, the cost of that in some years of extreme spring melt and precipitation creates flooding that costs the Canadian economy, and the provinces, communities, and farmers, billions of dollars in losses.
As you know, and as this committee has contributed to the work on the national conservation plan, we are increasingly focused on the part of that plan enabling wetland restoration—something that we share objectives on with the United States—and on finding ways to incent the agricultural community to restore wetlands, at the same time as allowing them to enjoy greater productivity on the fertile lands that they're still farming. But perhaps it's finding ways of incenting them with a variety of possible tools to re-establish those wetlands.