The difficulty is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was on the list, or on more than one of the lists we received, because initially people thought it would be a good thing to see what could be done as part of the environmental concerns up there, whether it's within our jurisdiction or not. Frankly, not very much of this stuff is the jurisdiction of the federal government, let alone of this committee. Many of these things are of particular concern to the environment committee; this is the natural resources committee, after all.
I say that only because it is just four days away, and the clerk has made arrangements to have these people come. If it were a little further down the road, I think it would have been easier to change them around. We've had these people prepare for this meeting. Even at our last meeting we discussed that they were coming, and there wasn't any objection at that time. I just think this could be a little difficult.
I don't mean to suggest that by allowing the reclamation and boreal forest people to come next Tuesday it would preclude further discussion in other areas. I think we can still get that in by Christmas. We do have a date available.
This is news to me about breaking. I mean, we're pretty clear that we're going to be here until December 15, but there may be something.... If in fact there is an earlier break, we're going to have to reschedule these people to the new year in any event. I was just hoping we could get it all done before Christmas. But I will take that into consideration.
To the clerk, in terms of seeing to the requests of the committee, do the best you can to do that, because I think there is clear interest in the sequestration particularly. We'll ask you to give us an updated report on Tuesday at the start of the meeting so that we know where we go from here.
Tuesday is not going to be a long meeting in any event. Maybe then we could even try to get somebody to start discussion on other areas for consideration. We only have about an hour and a half on land reclamation and boreal forest, so we could probably put in half an hour on a different topic. Perhaps the clerk could get some thoughts from Mr. Ouellet as to who might come. We could put them in on Tuesday, if they could come on short notice.
Yes, sir.