I call this meeting to order.
Welcome, everybody. We're grateful for your attendance at the first meeting of this new study. I'd like to welcome our four groups of witnesses, and I'll get to them in a moment.
This is meeting number two of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources. I don't think I need to go into any detail on how the committee process works, because all of our witnesses have done this before many times, I'm sure. I'll just remind you that because it's a virtual meeting, wait until whoever you're speaking to or whoever is speaking to you finishes so that we can allow the translators to do their thing without any unnecessary challenges.
We're going to go to opening remarks for up to five minutes each. I don't think that's standard across every committee. I'm the policeman, which means I have to enforce the time limits on people and interrupt sometimes to stop them if we're going over time. I'll try to limit that as much as I can, but I will apologize in advance. Thank you.
We have four groups of witnesses today. We have the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of the Environment and the National Research Council of Canada. Thank you all very much for taking the time to be here. We look forward to hearing your opening remarks and your answers to our questions.
I am going to proceed on the order that's set out on the agenda, which means that Steve Jurgutis, the director general of the strategic policy branch from the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food will start us off.
Sir, the floor is yours.