Thanks, Larry.
As has just been positioned, there will be a number of choices, and the options that are shown there are just illustrative. There will be many more options that will be considered over time, so this is really the start of a conversation—which is the important point. It's not the end of a conversation, but a critical piece.
Committee rooms are along that line. We have clarity on the requirements. It's a question of where committee rooms should be situated. It's important to consider the location of those committee rooms in the fullest context of the parliamentary precinct. There's a tendency, as we are focusing on the Centre Block project right now, to want to try to fit everything into the Centre Block, but we may be well served, and Parliament may be well served, by thinking of the broader context as we try to move forward into an integrated campus, with the facilities increasingly being integrated with tunnel infrastructure, for example. So this decision of where to locate committee rooms will be very important.
The last point I'll make on this slide is with regard to the heritage committee rooms within the Centre Block. There are challenges with bringing those up to a high level of security that, for example, a caucus room would require. We have made investments in the West Block, and as we move to a parliamentary complex it may be useful to think of how the West Block and the Centre Block could be used in tandem as an integrated facility.
I'll move to next slide.
This gives you an illustration of where committee rooms are right now, as the Centre Block is now offline. Many of those committee rooms now are not on the Hill proper. You can see that for both the House of Commons and the Senate, there have been a number of major investments off the Hill.
How can we leverage those investments over the long term and ensure that the parliamentary operations remain the primary driver of where the functions that serve Parliament should be located?
The next slide attempts to articulate a diversity of locations where committee rooms could be located. You can see, in the Centre Block, the return of committee room functions that were in the Centre Block, both for the House and the Senate. You can see the potential for committee room locations within the visitor welcome centre phase two. You can see the idea of what are called pavilions on the north end of the Centre Block, and the idea of putting committee rooms where the chamber is in the West Block.
The East Block will go under major restoration for the Senate. Committee rooms could be added there. Of course, the existing committee rooms in the Wellington Building and the Valour Building are there. They remain as important investments. Also important to consider is the fact that we will be working to develop new facilities for both the House and the Senate of Canada adjacent to the former U.S. embassy at 100 Wellington, initially to provide swing space so that we can empty the Confederation Building, which requires restoration as well as the East Block, and then over the long term those would become permanent accommodations for Parliament. That again is a potential location space for committee rooms.
We have to sequence all of this over time to make sure it meets the needs of parliamentarians, but it's an important conversation about how to move that along over time to make sure we're making the best investments on behalf of Parliament to serve the needs of a modern parliamentary democracy.
Again, it's an important dialogue that will take place over the coming months.
I'll pass it back to Larry to continue.