Thank you, Mr. Ouellet.
And again, I want to thank the committee, and for the record, our witnesses, and also Brian Jean, our member of Parliament for Fort McMurray. He was unable to be here today. He is Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, and his committee is meeting at the same time.
I'm sorry he couldn't be here. It was his suggestion that you come, and I think it was a very good suggestion.
The committee has very much appreciated your testimony today. Again, thank you very much for appearing.
We will take a minute. As they're packing up and carrying on, I just want to get the attention of the committee, to talk very briefly about where we go from here. I'll just run down the list of witnesses we have scheduled until the end of the session and then ask your advice on where we proceed from here.
Next week, we will begin on Tuesday with a session on land reclamation and the boreal forest. It was one issue that was particularly evident to those of us who had the opportunity to visit Fort McMurray, and it's one we want to pursue. Obviously it came up again today. We're going to have a representative of the industry, the manager of land reclamation from Syncrude, and we're going to have Mary Granskou of the Canadian Boreal Initiative, which is an NGO that looks at this initiative across the north.
We'll be away on Thursday, because of the convention in Montreal. We won't have a meeting.
We'll return on Tuesday, December 5. Again, we will be discussing the environmental impact of the oil sands and the community. We will have the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency appearing with the Cumulative Environmental Management Association, CEMA. That will take up the first hour.
In the second hour, we are hoping to have Vance MacNichol, who is the chairman of the Oil Sands Multi-stakeholder Committee. This is a committee that is very similar to what we're trying to do here. It was established in Alberta, and I understand they've done some very good work. Rather than us recreating the wheel, we'd like to hear from them.
It may be as well that from that testimony we will find other areas we wish to pursue, to delineate information we have heard. That will be a busy day on December 5.
On Thursday, December 7, we're going to hear about prospects for nuclear power to recover oil sands. We did hear from some people in Fort McMurray about this prospect. It has come up a few times. That is about perhaps replacing the use of natural gas with nuclear power.
We'll hear from the Energy Alberta Corporation, which is making a proposal in that regard. Also, we think we will hear from a leading expert in it, Dr. Keith, from the University of Calgary, who has a different point of view from our first witness. That should be an interesting discussion of the possibility of using nuclear power in the oil sands. Also, we'll hear from Dr. Angus Bruneau, who is the chair of the R and D working group on the oil sands.
That, to this point, concludes the witnesses.
Then we will have two more days before the Christmas break. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. My sense is that we may want to use one more day for some wrap-up witnesses--not in terms of blue-skying or going out looking for new witnesses--to focus on areas on which you want more information. They may derive from some of the witnesses we've heard to date, or from those we will hear subsequent to this. I thought maybe on the last day before we have the Christmas break we might look at our direction, maybe just to have a blue-sky meeting, where we could talk about the direction our committee wants to go.
I'm going to ask our researcher to outline a draft to see if that captures where we think we'd like to go with the report, with the thought of giving direction to your input. When we adjourn for the Christmas break, we would leave the researcher with all this data and hearings, plus your input, and ask for a draft report to be made in the break. We'll give you five weeks to prepare a report from the information the committee has given you and in February we will begin a point by point analysis of that draft to come up with a report within a couple of weeks, I hope.
That's the sense I've been getting from speaking with you. I welcome your comments.
Madame DeBellefeuille.