Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Madame Lepine, I'm so glad that you are here. I'm going to ask a number of questions because I'm trying to get a picture for our committee for us to understand some of the impacts.
I come from Treaty No. 9, a little bit east of Treaty No. 8. I'm no stranger to tailings ponds. We call them “slimes” back home. Kids played on them. There's one pretty close to my house.
I'm trying to get a picture of just how big the tailings ponds from the oil sands are. One example I had for 1.4 trillion litres of water was 560,000 Olympic-size swimming pools running back to back from Fort McMurray to Australia and back again. That would be the amount of water. Or you could fit two cities of Vancouver in the tailings ponds that exist now at Fort McMurray and the oil sands operations to the north. Where does that water come from?