Thank you.
For those who know the history, it's a very interesting situation. It's a typical resource quandary, because protection of fish has to be paramount to the department, but for the province there's a very real concern that, depending on how the snowpack melts in British Columbia, there can be flooding and there are many communities along the Fraser that could be affected by that flooding.
The province, at the moment, has situated gravel removal in the hands of its provincial emergency response program, PEP. My responsibility right now is to work with the provincial government and our people to help get us away from a crisis response to how this should happen and develop more of a long-term planning approach, which takes as its core the two fundamental requirements—that we remove the gravel in such a way that we ensure maximum flood protection, while protecting fish to the maximum of our ability as well.
The link between flooding and the growth of gravel, because gravel keeps getting deposited every year, is not necessarily straightforward. It's a matter of picking those sites where there would be maximum benefit to the flood control program, recognizing that the bulk of the flood control program has to be the building up of the dikes and the other work the province has to do, but gravel removal has a certain role in it.
To answer the specific question, for this year the removals that were planned for this spring are almost complete, and now we're working on a medium plan for what needs to be done next January and then a long-term plan so that we don't have to deal with this on a yearly basis, out of fear of what may happen. As in all resource management, it ought to be on a planning basis, and that's the plan we're putting together right now. I think we're generally satisfied.