If you could stop me at five minutes, as a common courtesy I'd like to give the last two minutes to Mr. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith. Thank you.
Thank you all very much for being here. I apologize for the fact that we had to step out and are going to have a shortened time frame here, so that I'm not going to get to ask you all the things I want to ask you.
One of the pre-eminent concussion advocates is Ken Dryden. We had him here at our committee. He has said:
We need only to penalize all hits to the head, because whether a blow is from a stick, an elbow, a shoulder or a fist, whether it's done intentionally or accidentally, whether it's legal or illegal, the brain doesn't distinguish. The damage is the same.
That was his personal plea to the NHL and to Gary Bettman. I know that Hockey Canada does not speak to the NHL or the NHL Players Association in that way, but you have zero tolerance.
Now, I don't know whether zero tolerance speaks exactly to what Ken said there. I'm a father of, starting tonight in his first game ever, a junior B hockey player. You can get a kid in peewee who is six foot one and a kid in peewee who is four foot eleven, and you have a head shot when that six-foot guy hits the four-foot-eleven guy regardless of whether there was intent or not. That's fine. It's not a terrible rule. Zero tolerance is a good thing.
Does it speak to the things that Ken wants it to speak to, and do you envision in the future zero tolerance at the minor hockey level through Hockey Canada organizations filtering up to the NHL level, whereby we will one day see what Ken wanted to see?