Thank you, Mrs. Desbiens.
I apologize if I didn't say your name correctly. French is not my first language, but I like to try when I have the opportunity.
Maybe I'll just jump back in.
We've had the privilege of speaking before at this committee.
As a captain and professional mariner, I've garnered a lifetime of global maritime experience related to marine industrial activities. In my role with the Coastal Restoration Society, I've subsequently understood how these marine-related industries impact our shared marine environments.
Showing up with Mr. Dorward and the Tla-o-qui-aht Nation today, our goal here is to try to encourage the committee to hold themselves and our government accountable to continuing to expand this opportunity of collaboration between not only nations, but NGOs and governments across all of Canada's coasts, not just in British Columbia. We have the largest coastline in all the world, as we know. That's something to be incredibly proud of, but it also comes with a lot of weight and responsibility.
We know, from tens of thousands of years of traditional first nations stewardship of these coasts, that a collaborative approach to long-term environmental sustainability is possible. We've thrown a wrench into the works with these large-scale anthropogenic spills. We need to now bring in more of a western perspective to deal with that specific anthropogenic debris and petroleum-based products, and nest that within traditional first nations stewardship, collaborative values and historical approaches.
If we can endeavour to collectively achieve a framework of collaboration that brings first nations more to the forefront of these response, recovery and processing frameworks, we're going to return to a methodology that had been in place for tens of thousands of years. By the way, it was very effective at overall shared environmental stewardship values.
I'm happy to continue to support Terry and the Tla-o-qui-aht nation in this work. As director of the Coastal Restoration Society, I would say that our overall coastal collaboration on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts with coastal first nations, and the projects that we've successfully implemented throughout the years, are evidence of this framework being highly successful, and something that we can implement on a much broader scale.
Thank you.