Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our guests.
Mr. Wells, it's nice to finally get to speak to you in person after reading so much about you and the work that you've done. I think a lot of us appreciate what you've done over the past while. You gave us a great little précis of what you've worked on in the past year or so. As well, the speech was so good you brought the lights down. There you go; it was very good.
I want to ask you, though, and I want to generalize to a point where.... With regard to the situation that occurs offshore, Mr. Clay alluded earlier to the large number of people who work in the offshore industry. I appreciate that fact. When it comes to the Department of National Defence, there is a very broad area. It's what they call the SRR, the search and rescue region, as you know. There may be two fishermen in trouble on the northeast coast off Bonavista. There might be 200 people in trouble across Hibernia. Thousands of people travel the gulf every day. On my first time on the job in 2004, the first thing I heard about was a medevac in northern Labrador, in Nain. It's incredible. The fact that search and rescue is tasked to do medevac as well certainly makes it an intense place to be, as you've experienced, and as I have too.
What I want to know--and maybe you can allude to the North Sea example as a good comparator--is where the responsibility is for private industry, as opposed to the government resources of the Department of National Defence. In other words, where is DND's role when it comes to the offshore operations?