Thank you, Chair.
Along with Alan, I'm hoping this is not going to become a partisan issue, because I don't think it should be. Anything I've heard in the last couple of days from the Prime Minister and the ministers in the House has been very explicit in noting that we want to make sure that no harm comes to anybody, especially in the environment. We tend to forget about the 17 or so people who lost their lives in that situation, which is a bad thing. So from my perspective, I'm not at all uncomfortable with the motion.
I guess there are a couple of questions I would like clarified—three questions, actually. The north is very much in line with what we had talked about before when looking at new things to talk about. I think we on our side are very interested in looking at the north, and I think there are a lot of things that we could possibly blend into this look at the north, including mining, geomapping, oil discoveries and oil drilling. I think they're all important aspects that we should probably look at. This could be a nice subset to that study.
So my first question with respect to Mr. Cullen's idea and the rest of the committee's ideas is whether this is something we should do as part of something bigger. That's the first question.
The second question is, how many meetings was Mr. Cullen thinking about devoting to this? If we all agree that we want to do something bigger, we can do something bigger.
Then the other question is about a practical start date, because when you're looking at BP, I suspect a lot of resources that would know anything about what we would want to do are probably a little tied up right now for the next week or two. What would be a practical start date for something like this?
I think those are all things we should take into consideration.
Fundamentally, I am certainly not averse to going down this path, but those are the three questions I would have, Chair, to see what the committee's will is and what Mr. Cullen had in mind for those areas.