Colleagues, I want to bring this meeting to order. Pursuant to Standing Orders 110 and 111, this is on the order in council appointment of the Honourable Stéphane Dion to the position of ambassador. This was referred to the committee on Friday, February 24, 2017.
We're going to move this along at a fairly good clip. We'll let the Honourable Stéphane Dion, our new ambassador to Germany, make some opening comments, and then we'll get right into questions. As you know, there's a vote this morning. As usual, it will interrupt our proceedings. We'll try to manage the clock as best we can.
First of all, I want to introduce our witness and the ambassador, Mr. Dion, and his colleague Alexandra Bugailiskis. She is the assistant deputy minister of Europe, Middle East, and Maghreb. She'll be here to answer some of the technical questions, if Mr. Dion doesn't know everything that we think he does. That won't be a problem for Alexandra this morning.
I'm going to turn the floor over to the Honourable Stéphane Dion for opening comments, and then we'll go into the usual practice of Q and A.
Mr. Dion, the floor is yours.