Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses for being with us today, in person and virtually. I greatly appreciate that. I also want to thank them for the presentations they provided us. They helped in some aspects.
Ms. Tong, I got yours only about an hour ago, but I had a chance to read it. It was nice to see that you were able to comment on a lot of what you included within your document.
I'll going to bounce all over the place.
Dr. Hird, I'm going to start with you. In the book you wrote, you talked about four waste hierarchy positions: reduce, reuse, recycle and disposal. A lot of this is what we've heard about the circular pattern when we're talking about plastics and how we deal with them.
My question to you is why you didn't put in re-educate, as in re-educate Canadians. As a professor in environmental studies who educates students at Queen's University, you do that, but that is a huge challenge that we as Canadians need to overcome. To Ms. Tong's point, as Canadians, we could be the leader in dealing with recycling in just one aspect of that circular pattern.
My question to you is on the issue of re-education. Why are we not focusing at least part of that? Instead of there being just those four points, why are there not five?
I see so many Canadians who walk around and throw out plastic. I brought a lid from the soup we get. For those who can see it, it's from downstairs. It says on here it is compostable, which is good and nice to see, but Canadians throw it out. They throw cigarette butts all over the place. They throw garbage and whatever all over the place, and it just scatters. Whether it's a plastic straw.... There's just so much waste.
Why are we not focusing on that re-education?