Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to pick up on that last note. It seems as though we're taking a “hurry up and wait” approach in many ways. I understand that the minister said there was a definite need to act, but we seem to be imposing measures that are going to take decades to have any effect. We talk about road closures and we talk about reforestation; those will not happen overnight. These are remote areas. We are not planting semi-mature trees, so it will be a very long process.
The preliminary socio-economic analysis the department produced says that the incremental benefits of an order cannot be assessed due to uncertainty with respect to how an emergency order would increase the probability of recovering the species. Now, Minister Guilbeault falsely said that maternal penning and wolf predation reductions don't work, and I appreciate that CWF has clarified that they do in fact work. Perhaps it is a fair criticism to say that it is not the long-term solution and that we still may need to undertake efforts like this, but the science in a peer-reviewed article by one of our previous presenters from Ecological Applications shows that the best way for an annual instantaneous rate of increase is penning and wolf reduction.
Therefore, my question to the department and to CWF is this: Why would we take an approach that we don't know is going to work but that we know, if it does work, will take a very long time, when, if we are in such an emergency decree situation, we could take action that is more immediate, that will be more effective and that will buy us time to take on these more important, longer-term solutions?