I think the research that we've been exposed to anyway suggests that, again, epigenetics is being impacted. There are changes not only to female fish turning into male fish and male fish turning into females, but it's complicating genetics not just for aquatic life but also human life. We see that in stats, lowering how many girls are born, and when you look at mitochondrial DNA, it becomes even more complex and quite fearsome in what we're seeing with the maternal study that we did. We're reporting young men who are now sterile at higher rates, so we're seeing a real impact on health and well-being. The future of our people is in peril, so how would we address this?
Health needs to get involved. The work of public health started in Canada because of water and airborne diseases, and for some reason, they have disconnected those things. I've been advocating at the tri-council level policy with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research that we need to do far more to prepare the population, to have them aware of what is happening and what the dangers are to their health and well-being, including epigenetics.
I would suggest that when we have an authority of women.... The first thing that women did was say we need to look at maternal health, which I would have honestly probably not looked at, but they wanted birthing centres to pull data together, which is what they did and what they found was quite alarming. We need to include health. That's how I would be addressing this, because if you can do what you did for COVID as a country...and you know that was a crisis. You know that was a looming crisis, yet with climate change and what we're seeing, the evolution of the types of diseases that are going to be released, the heat that is going to be taking lives....
Not even cities are prepared. First nations are most vulnerable. The United Nations has asserted that. We need to be able to have a holistic approach to the way that we would manage water, understanding that it's inextricably tied to human health and well-being. That's how I would manage it if I could dream it up. We would have a health authority working with the water authority, and Six Nations is already doing this. Our biggest supporters have been Six Nations Health Services in all of this work. Thank you.