Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, yesterday, I reported the bill, and I won't go in at length. It was fairly lengthy yesterday. The key issue here is climate change's major impacts on the Arctic. Of course, that has huge consequences for our jurisdiction.

Northerners know that the recent years of forest fires and coastal erosion, permafrost erosion, these issues are live issues that affect them, affect their communities, affect their families. The expectation is that we have a robust framework and mechanism to deal with them. Unfortunately, in previous years, that was not the case. That is what the Auditor General of Canada found in her audit.

The standing committee worked very diligently to gather evidence on the Auditor General's reports and looked at those recommendations very closely and spoke with departmental officials and officials from the office of the Auditor General, as well. This is not an issue about the people who are working at that department. This is a management issue. These audits are always management issues.

The committee takes no issue with the hard-working staff at the department or the hard-working staff at the public service in general. This is really about the kind of tools that this government needs to lead on climate change. We want to ensure, as a standing committee, that those tools are, in fact, in place and that all parties involved with this audit and the subsequent standing committee review understand quite clearly their roles and responsibilities under the government's commitments to climate change.

We appreciate that much of this work has been identified as ongoing in the government's Climate Change Strategic Framework. However, when the committee reviewed those drafts, many of the key findings and recommendations the Auditor General made that were accepted by the department were not clearly included in the Climate Change Strategic Framework. The department has acknowledged that. I understand they are working to correct that in the final form of this framework.

We will be making a number of recommendations that we will debate later in these proceedings. Key, I think, is understanding the contents of these recommendations. It is very easy to agree with the findings, but taking meaningful action to ensure that these problems are addressed and do not re-emerge, that is the interest of the standing committee.

It is not about being critical or scoring points. It is about making government better and ensuring that we can tackle the immense challenges that climate change represents to Northerners, to our communities, and to the people we serve.

With that, Mr. Chair, I will conclude my opening comments, but I welcome any other Member of the committee who wants to provide some comments that I may have missed. Thank you.