Thank you, Chair.
And thank you to the witnesses for appearing before the committee today.
I have a couple of points I want to touch on. In some of the background documents prepared for the committee, it says that this extension will give us jurisdiction over an additional half a million square kilometres of our water, which is roughly equivalent to the land mass of one of our prairie provinces. It also cited Senator Rompkey, in terms of the key word being “control”. We can prove that the water is Canada's, but what people care about is control.
There are two points there. One is that simply because we have legislation that extends the boundaries, without adequate resources to actually look at environmental protection, it's a fine statement to the international community about extending our boundaries, but the mechanisms to actually enforce it simply aren't there.
A number of you have touched on surveillance and enforcement. I'm more interested in the environmental aspects, so I'll direct my question to Mr. Adams.
It's very troubling in your statement that you indicated there are very few options for cleanup available. Given that, what do you see that needs to happen immediately in conjunction with this piece of legislation?