Thank you.
I want to thank all the guests for coming.
First of all, to the committee, welcome to Gander. Although with Mr. Tucker in the room as deputy mayor, I'm probably not as qualified.... Welcome to Gander, and I hope you enjoy your stay. I wish you could be here longer to spend oodles of money, but I guess we'll take what we can get.
I want to thank the guests for coming here. As I discussed earlier, I'm glad you came here as both the authority and the town to give the committee a sense...and to read into the record just how linked this base is with this community and the entire region. To hear this from the deputy mayor, who certainly has a handle on how this works--I've often joked that Mr. Turner, who's the chief administrative officer, probably knows enough about this base to get a second job in operations over at the base itself.
Several years ago there was a campaign here called SOS—Save Our Squadron. I think it was a learning experience for everybody within this community. Everybody in this community and this region knew about search and rescue, about response times. Fixed-wing search and rescue, although it's puzzling to some, basically means search and rescue airplanes. You mention the words “fixed-wing search and rescue” to anybody in this community and we know what you're talking about. We've argued for quite some time about the presence of that.
I just want to get a quick comment, before I go to Mr. Johnson, about the traffic activity you've seen at the airport, as immense as it is with medevac and that sort of thing, and also from the town itself, and about what a great contribution search and rescue has made, from a citizen's point of view, and from the point of view of airmen and airwomen who come here.