Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our meeting.
In particular, welcome, Mr. Minister.
There are a couple of really quick housekeeping items before we start.
Last week some of you asked me if in the wintertime we couldn't hold our meetings a little further south. We have managed that. I hope you're enjoying 131 Queen Street.
It is an interesting debate, though. Would you rather drink coffee out of a plastic can up in the West Block or would you rather have Starbucks three blocks away? I'm going to go with Starbucks and three blocks away.
Anyway, good morning. On the questioning rounds for the committee members, we're going to get a presentation from the minister, and then I can appreciate that many of you are going to want to have an opportunity to ask the minister questions. We will do our normal cycle, which is seven minutes, but I would like to keep it to seven minutes. So what I'll do is when there's a minute left, I'll just say “one minute”, and we don't need to stop the conversation, but that gives both the questioner and whoever is answering the question a warning that we're into the last minute. That way, hopefully, we can get as many turns as possible.
There is one other quick reminder. For those of you who have amendments to Bill C-21, please get them to the clerk as soon as possible so that we can have those prepared for Tuesday's meeting.
At this point, I would like to call for vote 1a under Indian Affairs and Northern Development. To begin this process, I'd like to ask our special guest today, Minister Chuck Strahl, to make a presentation.