Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for coming back. This is really interesting testimony.
Dr. Orihel, I was reading on your Wikipedia page that the magazine Nature dubbed you “Lady of the Lakes” after your work to save the Experimental Lakes Area. I remember studying limnology at the University of Victoria with a fellow named Rick Nordin. He told us about the importance of the Experimental Lakes Area. Of course, the funding for it was cut under the Harper government, so perhaps I'll start just by thanking you for that really important work.
Part of this study is dealing with the tailings ponds. You may be familiar with the testimony that we heard from a number of witnesses on that topic, including, most notably, the Alberta Energy Regulator. I think one of the pieces that's been missing is a sense of the scale and scope of the issue in a national context. From your testimony today, it sounds like there are some promising treatments that could be employed for tailings.
Maybe you can just talk for the rest of the time and provide the committee with some context that we can include in the report. I'm keen to know how much tailings are out there on the land base, how the tailings ponds in the oil sands region rank in terms of environmental liabilities in this country, how much of the tailings are currently being treated and what the long-term plan is for this area. I've flown over the oil sands and it's absolutely astounding, the scale of what's involved.
I know there are a lot of environmental liabilities in this country, not just from mines but from other developments as well. Can you just provide the committee with a high-level sense of what we're dealing with here?