Good afternoon.
On behalf of all the members of the committee and the staff, I'd like to say how wonderful it is to be in Whitehorse. People have been so friendly and warm, and it's such a lovely setting. It's a great opportunity for us to learn more about how people in the territory feel and what they think about electoral reform.
It's our thirtieth meeting. We held hearings in Ottawa during the summer and now we are travelling for three weeks. This is the first day of hearings in our second week of travel. Tomorrow we're off to Victoria.
I'll give you an overview of how we've been proceeding. Each witness will be afforded 10 minutes to present. We're a bit tight for time in this panel, so if you can do eight or nine minutes, you certainly get brownie points from the chair, let's put it that way. But you do have a full 10 minutes. At 10 minutes we have to stop the presentation, but it doesn't mean you won't have an opportunity to express your viewpoint during the question and answer period.
After the presentations we have a question and answer period where each member of the committee is allotted five minutes to engage with the witnesses. The five minutes include answers. Sometimes only 30 seconds are left for an MP in that five-minute segment.
I would suggest to the members that if you're at that stage, you might want to use the remaining 30 seconds for a statement or a very rapid-fire question, because before you know it we'll be over the five-minute mark.
To the witnesses, if we are at the five-minute mark and there's no time to answer, please don't worry. You'll have an opportunity the next time you have the mike to answer the previous question, if you wish. We're pretty flexible that way, but we do have to keep to some strict rules about time limits.
We have three witnesses with us this afternoon. Appearing as individuals we have Mr. Kirk Cameron and Mr. Peter Becker. Then appearing on behalf of the Green Party of Canada, Yukon section, we have Mr. Gerald Haase.
We'll start with Mr. Cameron for 10 minutes, please.