Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to welcome all the new members of the committee, especially the member for Pontiac, a member from Quebec; I say that out of good-natured regionalism.
I'd like to welcome you, Ms. Chatel, to this committee. You'll find that we generally work very well together.
As for the invitation to travel, Montreal is an hour and a half or two hours from here. You can get there by train or by bus. So it's not really a problem, I think, for our colleagues in British Columbia or elsewhere. Of course, for Quebeckers, going to Montreal is not a problem.
Now, I just want to say that we're absolutely determined, if the committee so decides, to visit the oil spill site in northern Alberta. We talked about it a lot last spring. Our ambition was to go there and use the opportunity to travel across Canada at the same time, but upon reflection, I think that we were perhaps a little too ambitious.
In any case, I would just like to make sure that this trip to Montreal won't hurt our chances of getting funding to visit the site of the oil spill and meet with the indigenous community there. It's very important for us to do this, out of respect for the people who have suffered from this situation and to experience the same reality as they have.
We understand that flights in that area are not very frequent. We're well aware of that. That said, one of our roles as members of Parliament is to see how people across Canada experience their daily reality. Even if, by chance, we had to take a lot of flights to get there and there were costs involved, even though I'm a very strong fiscal Conservative, and I feel that every expense is suspect and that there are no small savings, I believe that, in this case, it would be our role, our duty and our responsibility to do so. We need to go where the problems are and meet directly with Canadians who are experiencing problems like the one last spring.
I just want to make sure that this event in Montreal, although it looks very interesting, doesn't undermine our budget capacity to travel to Alberta later to see first-hand the impact that this oil spill a few months ago has had on indigenous communities.
Thank you.