Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
I just want to say, Mr. Winfield, that I appreciate that you ended the last question by saying that the boreal caribou have no chance if an emergency order is not put in place. We may question what the probability of success is of this program, but we know they will not be here. They'll be extirpated if we do not do something.
As you know, from 2002, this species has been on the species at risk list. There's so much work that's been done over the years, and as several witnesses have said, these animals are the most studied of any in Canada. We know a lot about them.
There seems to be this tension attached to short-term profitability and job retention. Of course, jobs are very important. In fact, our government has created more jobs than any other government, but it's the role of government to look at the longer term and not just at short-term profit. I'm wondering if you could put this in context in terms of these jobs in the forestry sector.
When we have a Sustainable Jobs Act in place and we know that there has to be a transition and the health of these forests is so linked to the health of the caribou, are these jobs going to be there longer than another two or three years, say, if the caribou are extinct and these circumstances of climate change, forest fires and all these other things continue to grow? Are we looking at just a short-term solution as opposed to a long-term solution when we simply focus on saving the jobs and the types of jobs that are there today, rather than looking at long-term employment for these communities that are so important?