Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the witnesses for attending today.
I would like to take up the line of questioning of Mr. Brison, in particular in relation to festivals and the recommendations made by your group. I live in Fort McMurray and I've lived there for a long time. There were 1,500 people living there when I arrived in 1967. Today there are about 140,000, including the people in the oil sands camps. We're seeing tremendous change, but the one thing I haven't seen a change in is the number of festivals that my constituency has, particularly in Fort McMurray.
We had a rodeo for a long time. We had a winter carnival, one of the longest-running winter carnivals in the world. We had the second-longest dog-sled race in the world at one time. All of them have fallen by the wayside because of funding. I saw our government spend a considerable amount of money on large festivals, but I'm wondering about the smaller festivals and the ones that operate totally with volunteers. How do we go about supporting them? What do you think of the support we've given as a government in the past? Some of my festivals got some funding for the first time in many years over the last year, and I was pleased to be able to advise them of that. They told me that they couldn't continue the festivals without funding.