Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning Mr. Fortier, Mr. Boles and Mr. Delage.
Mr. Fortier, I would like to address this question to you to be sure I have proper understanding. You seem to have successfully fulfilled the mandate you were given, because you were able to find potential buyers—we don't know who all of them were, but you did find potential buyers. The witness sitting next to you represents the company that went the furthest in this whole process.
However, since we began our discussions with the other witnesses—in other words, the officials from Shell, including Shell managers at the Montreal refinery—we have been discussing a very special context in which refineries in Canada have operated since about 1970. More than 35 refineries—large refineries—have shut down. We're not talking about small refineries. We are told that Shell had reached the stage where it felt it had to consider shutting down the refinery in order to convert it to a terminal. We talked about conversion to a terminal, a project which is currently at a standstill as a result of a court ruling.
When you received your mandate and began discussions with potential buyers, did you talk about the special context in which North American refineries have been operating—namely that more of them are being shut down than are being started up? In Quebec in particular, there is a much greater focus on hydroelectricity than on oil. Have you explained the particular context in Quebec to future buyers? Was all of this explained to Delek US Holdings? Were they given a demonstration of this so that they would really know what they were getting into?