Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our second round of witnesses for joining us here today.
Mr. Bourque, your opening comments really reflected what this committee has been looking into for the last month or so. Previous environment committees have been looking into this as well.
Basically, we agree, but there are some factors that have been holding up some of the solutions you're suggesting. Some of them, of course, are monetary. The government does have a fiscal responsibility to taxpayers in terms of deficits and budgets and whatnot, but there are also some practical obstacles in front of us: mainly legislation and the regulations that flow from that.
We've tried to address this internally back in our region, but just to give you an example, we have fisheries legislation and regulations that actually prohibit any type of mitigation or remediation. What I'm getting at is that if we want to accomplish what the witnesses are talking about, we'd have to revamp a whole set of legislation and all the regulations beneath that, and we'd have to communicate that to the citizens of Canada. There are so many provisions already under our Canadian legislation that need not only our involvement but our inclusion in terms of land-based decisions, specifically for first nations.
I don't expect you to answer this, but based on your experience and your success in your region, where do you suggest that government start in terms of some of these remediation and mitigation policies?