Thank you to all of you for appearing. Of course I'm well aware of the airshed groups, and I commend you. You have a good number of them across the province. I'm hoping I'll have time to ask you a couple of questions about the federal role.
But my first questions are to Dr. Smol. Thank you very much for coming. I know, regrettably, your colleague in much of your work, Dr. Schindler, just wasn't well enough to attend. I understand he's going to send a brief.
I'm aware of your work, from a distance. This is the first time we've met, and I'm happy you could come. On long-range monitoring in the oil sands and the identification, as I understand, that it may well be that some of those pollutants are going farther afield than we had thought, and that there may be some accumulation across projects, can you speak a bit about that?
When I was on the environment committee previously, we did a study on the impact of the oil sands on water. One of the frustrations voiced by the scientists who testified was that, while there is some research out in the field about the accumulation of these substances and the long-range transmission, there's not a lot of timely response by the government in regulation, for example, of PAHs and mercury and so forth.
I would appreciate if you could talk a bit about the relationship between the kind of research you do in collaboration with Environment Canada and so forth, and whether or not you think there is timely response to your findings by the authorities.