Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here and for providing your comments and sharing your knowledge.
I should say, Mr. Potoczny, that your representative in Alberta, Vitaliy Milentyev, is my cousin, and he has been keeping me informed of what's going on. I just wanted to thank him for that.
We all understand what's going on. I just learned, for example, that Russian MPs have been sent to Crimea and are talking to TV channels about expedited Russian citizenship, and this type of interference.
Russia is not going to go away. Should Canada be playing a role as a middle power to somehow bring Russia into the fold with the EU so that we can create, once and for all, a free and democratic country, but with support and without posing a threat to Russia at the same time? In other words, involve them and the EU, in everybody's best interests, to have, once and for all, as I said, this free and democratic country that is able to function with the European Union and still maintain ties with an economic partner such as Russia. If that's the case, should we be making more of an effort as a country to try to bring this together?
We don't want this to turn into a geopolitical battle or a battleground between the west and Russia. We can't have that. It's a question that has been on my mind in the last few days and I'm glad I'm here so I can ask you that.