Thank you all for being here before us today.
I have a lot of questions, but I'll try to get through things quickly.
I'm from British Columbia, and the mountain pine beetle is a big deal for us there. Before I got this job, I was an ecologist and I worked a fair bit with the forestry industry.
What I saw with the mountain pine beetle locally was that we had research areas where they threw everything at mountain pine beetles in the Cascades. They were using very high-intensity, expensive treatment methods, such as pheromone trapping and local burning, and the issue just got bigger and bigger. It didn't matter what we did. To me, that was the lesson we learned, especially from the last big outbreak.
I'm looking at the maps here of its spreading across Alberta. Is there anything we can do to stop the spread there? Friends of mine are employed in this and making good money trying. What is the real strategy there, or are we just stuck with something and should hope to get some early cold winters and cool, wet summers?