Thank you; I think we'll begin. I was going to wait until we had a couple more, but we now seem to have more than a quorum. So I will welcome our witnesses today. In the interest of their time and ours, we'll get started, and if there's any other business we want to conduct, we will do that at the end of the meeting.
The format, as we discussed earlier, is that we hear from the witnesses for about half an hour—in this case, about 10 minutes each—for opening remarks and then open it to the committee for questioning.
The notion of this gathering and those for the next month would be to ascertain areas of interest to the committee and further background information, and really to educate us on the pressing issues of the day as they relate to natural resources. We'll attempt to define what topics we might want to pursue in greater depth in the fall.
With that, let me introduce, first of all, Ralph Pentland, who is a consultant and former director of water planning and management at Environment Canada and the author of the 1987 Federal Water Policy. We have Ian Campbell, who is senior project director for the sustainable development policy research initiative at the Privy Council Office, and David Brooks, director of research at Friends of the Earth Canada.
Gentlemen, thank you for coming. With that, I would like to ask you to proceed in the order I presume you've discussed amongst yourselves. Please go ahead.
Ian, are you going to start?