Thank you, Chair.
I really appreciate the opportunity today to be here, as it is my constituency. I appreciate the witnesses coming forward. I actually have lived in Fort McMurray since 1967, when there were approximately 1,500 people, so I've seen some tremendous changes.
I would like to agree with Mr. Godfrey that leadership is all about knowing, and indeed about knowing the facts and the truth, and not about fear-mongering. And I don't want you to think that I'm picking on you, as one of the witnesses, at all, but my mother is a historian from Fort McMurray, and she would feel that I wasn't doing my job if I didn't point out the first commercial application of oil sands, and that was actually back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when, as Peter Pond has identified, aboriginals used it for patching canoes. I wouldn't want to lose the opportunity to set the record straight on that. Maybe you want to change your book. I would certainly be prepared to allow my name to stand on that particular fact.
If I understand it correctly, surface mining is in essence taking a big shovel, digging into the earth, removing everything—especially the contaminants that are in it, such as crude oil, sulphur, coke, nitrogen, and calcium—taking all of those contaminants and the earth, putting them into a big bowl, in essence taking soap and hot water, removing the contaminants, putting the earth back where it was before, and reclaiming the land with bushes, trees, and shrubs.
Does that pretty much describe the surface mining opportunities in northern Alberta at this stage?