Thank you, Chair.
I think you said at the end of your statement there that it speaks to efficiency. If you aggregate many, many small impacts—let's say a few square metres of fish habitat impact or one culvert.... If there are tens of thousands of those, that's a significant impact. I think that in order for the system to function well, fees in lieu is a great way to be able to aggregate that money, deploy it in larger, more impactful fish habitat projects, and then be able to have that system function in such a way that proponents are not, you know, overly stressed or overly charged in what the activities cost to be able to mitigate those impacts—that they're not being lost in the system.
You know, it's.... If you have major projects, the province is putting together a major project proposal, there are some major fish habitat impacts. That's, you know, all of the sunk costs or your capex costs for building out that project; you can justify that. If you're a small proponent and you have a log dump—you're a small logging operation—you have to put a logging road in, and you have a few culverts to do. There's a way to very efficiently collect the fees for that, and our advocacy would be to enable indigenous-led organizations or first nations to lead the larger restoration project that would utilize that money in an efficient way. You'd get the efficiencies of scale for the per-unit reductions.