Thank you.
Thank you to all the witnesses who showed up here today.
I'd like to dwell on a couple of things. Yes, as Ms. Gelfand said, sustainability has been part of our government for approximately 30 years, but sustainability was in this country when the first settlers came in. I remember my grandfather, who settled in this country in 1905, talked about sustainability on his quarter section. He planted a crop. The next year he summer-fallowed. He talked about trapping in the early days. He said you couldn't trap in one forest area all the time. You had to take so many animals, and then let it prosper.
Sustainability has always been here. For any individual in this room, they've had a sustainability plan in their life. For us as a government, it's a lot more complex. It's a lot easier when you're an individual and you only have yourself to be accountable for. If you're a corporation, you have a CEO who probably has a lot of clout, because he's the one who's making the decisions. Right now I see us in government with a very broad, complex country. As Mr. Shields alluded, Canada is made up of roughly 12 regions, with four forms of government, and we need to come up with a good plan to meet global expectations.
I'm going to fire a question off to Mr. Gunton. Looking at the demographics of our country, we have the provinces and the Northwest Territories and the different regions of the Northwest Territories. We have provincial governments and the federal government. We have aboriginal people we need to take into concern. One thing we must realize is that if anybody in this country knows about long-term sustainability, it's our aboriginal people, because they've lived off the land and they believe in what the land can give us.
You mentioned earlier that Canada has one of the lowest and Germany has one of the highest.... I understand that they have a fairly tight network on top in Germany. But how do you see us capturing all of Canada to come up with a very strong program?
That's a loaded question; sorry.