Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming. I know it's not easy. We do appreciate the testimony. It's worth while, and as the chair said, it will guide us in our deliberations.
I'll finish up with a few questions. Clearly in your case, Mr. McDonald, there was more than the response time, which is a given. There were clearly some notification difficulties or breakdowns in communication, which obviously is a part of the whole thing. The EPIRB limitation, of course--as we found out today, or yesterday, I forget--it might take from the time the EPIRB goes off.... Of course there's no indication of location. It could take as much as 90 minutes before they get a location from the EPIRB, just because of where the satellite is.
There is absolutely no question that the faster you can get to the scene of an accident, regardless of the kind of accident, whatever we're talking about, the better it is. That's pretty self-evident. It's the kind of thing that governments in Canada have been wrestling with over the decades. Governments of all stripes have been wrestling with this to try to do the best we can.
We talked about shared responsibilities. I'd like to follow up a little bit, Ms. Michael, with your conversation with Monsieur Bachand, that there is responsibility in the oil patch, in the case of a large industry, to take some of that responsibility. We talked at one point about having an aircraft at one of the sites.
Do you think it's a feasible, reasonable expectation that perhaps we talk about four big operations out there—or soon to be four—that there be some combination of effort among those companies to combine resources and put a capability on one of those rigs? Would that be a reasonable thing to follow up on with those companies?
