Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank to you our witnesses for joining us here today.
I think I should put it on the record to start with that I am an environmentalist. Having grown up in agriculture, having grown up during a lot of my younger years in the wilderness, I'm a strong advocate of protecting the environment. I'm just a little concerned by some of the language that's been raised here today.
In our budget bill last year we made some changes to navigable waters so we could get the stimulus spending out quickly so we wouldn't have duplicate environmental assessments, unnecessary duplicate environmental assessments, but rather make sure that we had one good, comprehensive one.
We had many environmental groups, mostly the canoeists, here telling us how the sky was going to fall. I haven't heard from the canoeists in a year, so I just take a your concerns with a bit of a grain of salt.
Mr. McCallum posed a very articulate question, and very well worded—