Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the minister for being with us for two full hours and for showing us your commitment to our committee, as well as for the fine work you're doing on climate change and the exciting legislation that we're going to be discussing today and, hopefully, in future meetings sequentially, so that we can get to the crux of the legislation before us.
Thanks to Mr. van Koeverden for introducing his motion several weeks ago. We've been trying to have this conversation. The Conservatives are blocking. The NDP are putting other motions on the table.
It's great that we're finally starting the conversation together, because halting and reversing biodiversity loss is one of the great challenges we face, on top of climate change. This is a parallel challenge. If we get it right, we can transition to a nature-positive Canada in working with indigenous people, knowing that their knowledge will contribute to our solution together.
We have some profound impacts happening on our collective well-being. The University of Guelph looks at “one health” and says that the one health initiative is important. On biodiversity loss, through the Biodiversity Institute, we're tracking the results of that loss, but we have to start recovering from the loss that we have in front of us.
Can you tell the members why Bill C-73 is so crucial, so that our committee can really grab hold of this study?