Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll keep them brief here. I know that the department is doing some work in the fuel efficiency area, particularly in the marine transportation and in some of the greening of the transportation facilities. This is good work that needs to continue and, in fact, needs to be government-wide. For the Department of Transportation, the potential gains compared to the emissions of greenhouse gases, for example, are pretty modest. So, much more serious is the greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts from transportation activity itself.

I’d like to know what this department is doing to ensure net emissions from transportation decline over time as per our goals of the greenhouse strategy, the goals of this government and hopefully all governments around the world, and particularly what programs of support does this department have for businesses and residents. What sorts of standards are they providing? What education and what legislation is being considered ultimately to achieve this?

Just sort of related to that, I want to comment briefly on one part of the Minister’s opening remarks where he refers a couple times to mitigating the impacts of climate change. It’s presented almost as a positive thing, and to some degree it is, because we need to adapt to the problems that climate change is bringing to us, but the basic message cannot be confused here that climate change has impacts. When we have to mitigate those impacts, those are costly and those are costing us more and more every year. What we really want to do is focus. We need to mitigate the impacts of climate change, but more important than that, according to all the science, we need to mitigate climate change itself. As with all of our programs, prevention is the rule.

I’m going to leave it at that. Thanks for this opportunity.