Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us.
Ms. Cardenas, I first heard of you in an article in Le Devoir. In it, you invoked section 8 of the act to affirm the collective nature of water resources and to promote better governance of water and associated environments. By the way, I completely agree about the collective nature of water resources.
In your opinion, granting legal status to the St. Lawrence River would strengthen the preservation of this great river and it would be a huge symbolic gesture.
That's kind of where I'm at in my thinking. Symbolic gestures of this nature are admirable, of course, but do they really enable us to protect the resource? For over 30 years, the UN has been trying to establish international rules for the protection of water, whether in Helsinki, New York or Berlin, and it has not succeeded.
How would the recognition of a legal status for water finally lead to the establishment of rules, or the updating of regulations and the adoption of concrete mechanisms, and even sanctions?