Thank you.
This image shows the Hill. The existing buildings are in blue, and the potential outline of the underground visitor welcome centre is in yellow. All those little circles represent the variety of entrances at the surface in the building.
The focus of moving toward a visitor welcome centre is to provide an efficient and secure entry for parliamentarians, visitors and business visitors. Essentially, the Centre Block will retain those surface entrances, so members will still enter in the members' entrances that lead into the foyer. The Speaker will still enter in the Speaker's entrance. The ceremonial activities will still happen at the front door under the Peace Tower, and accredited staff and parliamentarians can use that entrance as well.
What's really changing is the visitor and the business entrance into the building, as they will be moved out from Centre Block into the visitor welcome centre.
Again, we've done our homework and looked at the variety of possibilities on how to approach the visitor entrance to the Hill. What we are debating at this point are three options. The first two options are separating the business and public entrance into three separate entrances: one for the House business, one for the Senate business.... The first option is putting that public entry out at the south wall of what would be the visitor welcome centre, whereas the second option is pushing it back closer to the Vaux wall to be less disruptive to the front lawn.
What we're favouring at this point is a consolidated entry, for various operational reasons. However, we need to engage with parliamentarians to understand your view on the public entrance and how you meet and greet your constituents in that facility before we can come to any determination. We look at have those discussions in a more granular way with parliamentarians before deciding on an option that would go forward for further development.