I call the meeting to order. I want to welcome everybody here.
For those who may not be aware, we are the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans of the House of Commons. We are in the process, over the past number of months, of travelling and meeting with people across the country to study the small craft harbours program of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Our purpose is to gain as much feedback as we can from people who use the facilities, so we can hopefully enhance the program not only in the financial aspect but indeed in any and all ways, knowing full well that many of the people involved with the harbour authorities throughout Canada are volunteers.
We did an east coast trip about a month ago. We're delighted to be in Richmond today. We head up to Port Hardy, I believe, tonight and will spend a couple more days here in your beautiful province. I hail from Newfoundland and Labrador, so I'm a long way from home. We have interpreters here with us who will be translating our dialect. So I will ask our witnesses to keep an eye out for that, because we have a couple of people here we have to have interpretation for.
As I said, coming from Newfoundland, sometimes I have to carry my own interpreter, but my say here today will be very limited. Each of the committees of the House of Commons has a job to do their work without their staff and people who surround them, such as our analyst here, François, our interpreters, our technicians, our people back here. We are also delighted to have our clerk, who happens to be from British Columbia and who happens to have her mom and her two brothers in the audience today. Her mom, Margaret, and Gus and Mac, who are twin brothers, have joined us. We could have a couple of budding politicians here in the audience maybe.
We're delighted to be here today. Our process is that we open up the floor to have opening presentations from our guests and then we have a question and answer period where we go around. Just to give you an idea, the committee has representation from the four parties in the House of Commons: the Conservative Party, Liberal Party, Bloc, and we bring along this guy down here from the NDP, just for moral support every now and again. We have a very good working relationship, I must say, among our committee members. Most of us represent areas that have large fishing areas, and the small craft harbours program is a very important part of our work.
With that, I would like to ask Ms. Elizabeth McLeod, from the Harbour Authority Association of British Columbia, to give her opening remarks.
Maybe before we start we will ask each of you to introduce yourselves and the organizations you represent, for the record, and then we will go back to Ms. McLeod for opening remarks.
Thank you very much.