Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to make sure it was being addressed.
Thank you very much to the witnesses for being here today.
My understanding of why we're here today, and of the motion put forward around the study, is that we're here to learn not just about the impacts of hurricane Fiona—the costs, the damages, the impacts on human life and all of that—but also from these impacts. The reality is that we are in a climate crisis. We're feeling the impacts of the climate crisis. That was the reason that in my questions for the ministers I was talking specifically about that. We continue to experience the impacts of the climate crisis and then try to put band-aid solutions in response to the climate crisis. That doesn't actually help us in any way, because we need to be making some big changes in order to reduce the rate of extreme weather patterns that we're seeing.
To my mind, with the impacts we're seeing right now, our taking this time to look at it is an opportunity for us to discover how we can do things differently. I appreciate the term nature-based infrastructure that was used by Ms. Smith. I've been referring to it as green infrastructure, but we're all talking about the same thing. I would like us to be able to build on that in order to understand not only how we mitigate the impacts of it but also how we create infrastructure that will reduce the impacts moving forward, and of course the damages that we've already created.
I could go on for six minutes on a tangent on this all alone, but I don't want to do that, because I want to hear from you all.
Ms. Smith, you started to touch on this in relation to a question from my colleague Madam Desbiens. Can you expand a little bit further on what you see as effective nature-based infrastructure that we could be putting in? Can you speak a little bit to the ghost gear, the impacts of the ghost gear, and how we can do things differently around that? I'm trying to understand your thoughts on that a little bit more.