Mr. Blais, one of the things I would say in my second crack at this is in the context of the public workshops that we've held. I've stood at the front of a room in Campbell River for two and a half days and listened to people tell me that DFO and the people who work for it are not to be trusted. There's a very high degree of skepticism about whether or not we will follow through with what we say we will do.
I stood at the front of a room in Comox-Courtenay for a day and a half and heard the same thing. I've spent a lot of time meeting with first nations talking about this regulation and where it's expected to go, and again, a recurring theme, quite frankly, has been that there's a high degree of skepticism about what DFO says and what it will do.
When I meet with members of the environmental community, I talk to them about what we're planning to do and their response is usually of a nature of the kinds of comments that won't enter into the record here today. But I very rarely get a response to the effect that it's good to have DFO here and we're really happy to have you.
So I'm familiar with the skepticism and the difficulty you may have in believing me when I say that things are moving along in a way that is good.
We have been working very closely with our provincial colleagues, and please don't interpret this as just Pollyannaish and everything is marvellous and sweetness and light and so on. My colleagues--and I think of them as my colleagues--who work for the provincial government are not happy about this. There are people who have spent their entire careers building a program, building an administrative arrangement, and so on. This is what they do, and it's been taken away from them for nothing that they did. So many of them are hurting very much, and many of them feel personally a sense of loss and grief, and I don't mean to trivialize that in any way. At the same time, they're very much in the mode that the earth has moved; the court has ruled what it has ruled. This is not a time to say, fold your arms and be resistant. We're not doing it. That won't work.
So right from the outset, an awful lot of our discussion with the province was to say, okay, fine, we're stuck with this. The federal government didn't do this. We didn't go in and advocate taking on this role. The province didn't advocate moving it away, but this is what the court gave us to work with. And the response from the two bureaucracies and the leadership has been to say, okay, these are the new rules of the game; let's figure out how to work within them.
We have encountered very few problems in the discussions around how to make that happen, and to the extent that we have, they've been largely around logistical problems: how are we going to do this, this, and this?
But to give you an example of just how things are working, we're right down to the stage where the province has vessels and vehicles that they're no longer going to need, and we're working on arrangements to just transfer...more or less at cost, if that. It's that level of collaboration that's there. We're determined to make this work, and the province has just been there right from the beginning.
I was going to say I apologize if I make this sound too good. That's a bad way to put it. I just have to report, in all honesty, that things have been really good in terms of the relationship with them, and I think it will be going forward.