Thank you very much.
It's good to have you here today.
I want to talk about British Columbia, my home province. I was looking around the room and realized that I'm the only member from west of Selkirk, Manitoba.
I want to talk about our province specifically. As you know, there is no land forces base in British Columbia. CFB Chilliwack was closed in the mid-nineties. We have the Royal Canadian Navy and the Canadian Air Force there. The Canadian Forces have assisted with forest fires and flood threats--the slow-moving threats you can see developing. It's not a problem to get people from Edmonton to drive to Kamloops, for instance, to help.
When CFB Chilliwack was closed, the concern was what would happen in the event of a catastrophic event--the earthquake we're always told is coming within the next 100 years in the Vancouver area. What would happen now that there is no land forces base there, should there be a problem coming through the Rocky Mountains? How quickly could the Canadian Forces land troops respond in the case of a major catastrophe that we couldn't see coming?