Good morning everybody. It's great to be in Alberta, in Calgary. You guys have the weather on the west coast. We still have icebergs on the east coast. It's good to be here, and this is the second province our committee is visiting.
Our committee has been doing a study on the TPP and having consultations across the country. We are going to go to every province. This is our second stop. We will probably do the territories through a video conference.
Of course, we're probably going to be talking to some of our trading partners in Ottawa, from some of the embassies; but besides those, we'll also be getting many submissions from the general public. I think last week we had 6,000 and on the weekend it was 10,000, and I think it's up to 15,000 now, so there is a lot of interest out there, and that's good.
We've extended our deadline to the end of June because there's such an uptake. What will happen then is that our analysts will go through those submissions over the summer. These have to be translated and put together for us to go through them upon our return in September.
We are probably also going to do central Canada this spring and then probably Atlantic Canada in the fall.
This is a very ambitious task that we're embarking on, and we're hoping to have our report ready for the House of Commons before the end of the year. That would bode well for the House of Commons, because MPs will want to look at this before we vote on the agreement, which will probably be sometime in the first part of next year.
It would also work well because we'll be more in step with where the Americans are going.
With us on our committee, we have members from right across the country. Yesterday, I started with those from west, but I'll start with those from east today. I'm from the farthest east on our committee. My name is Mark Eyking and I'm from Cape Breton. We have Karen Ludwig and she's from New Brunswick. We have two members from Quebec who are back holding the fort in Ottawa. We have Mr. Lametti and Madame Lapointe. Then we have four members from Ontario, two from the Toronto area, Mr. Fonseca and Mr. Peterson, and we have Madam Ramsey from the Windsor area and Dave Van Kesteren from the south, down in the Leamington area. Of course, we have two westerners with us, Mr. Ritz and Mr. Hoback from Saskatchewan. We're from right across the country.