Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the comments from the Members. I don't agree with them, but I appreciate the opportunity to exchange these views.
First in regards to a caribou summit, I publicly announced that a number of months ago that we're going to do that, but it's predicated on the necessity to have information. There's no use to get all the people together, there's no use to get all the leaders and all the user groups together if we don't have information to talk about, that if we just sit around the table with each other and say well how many caribou have you heard, how many caribou have you heard that there are. I mean it would be sort of a pointless exercise unless we have all the best evidence we can get, which is what we are currently doing. We also have an obligation, a legal obligation to work with the land claim groups. It's written into the land claim agreements and it makes very good sense with the wildlife board to have this
shared responsibility, and we work very closely with them, and we consult with them and they give us their advice, and we most of the time agree and sign off the requests or recommendations they make to us in terms of their suggestions of how to deal with the wildlife, including caribou. We are the only agency, the only group that is doing any information gathering. Nobody else does that. We involve the wildlife boards, we use local people when we're flying over their territory when we're doing the counts, when they're doing the surveys and we're making every effort to be inclusive.
So we have a major issue here. There is significant decline in one of the major wildlife species in the Northwest Territories, as well as Yukon, Nunavut and across Northern Canada. We have to take all the necessary steps to get the evidence together and then start doing more coordinated planning and this is what this money is intended to do. Thank you.