Thank you for the question.
As you know very well, climate change is an existential threat from an environmental perspective. It is an existential threat for human health and it's certainly an enormous threat to our economy. Last year, we released “Canada's Changing Climate Report”, which highlighted the severity of the problem and the increasing intensity of the problem. It pointed out that Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. In fact, in the northern part of Canada, it is even faster than that. We are feeling the effects of climate change through the changes to permafrost, flooding, wildfires and deadly heat waves.
Climate assessments are an important tool to allow us to better understand how our infrastructure may be impacted and what we need to do from a climate resilience perspective going forward. Climate mitigation is critically important in order to not make the problem worse. The problem exists and it will get worse irrespective of the mitigation efforts. We need to ensure that we're focused on mitigation. It is very important that Canadians have that kind of information to make the appropriate choices.