No. That's not the information we've been given. We encourage the ministers to attend, but right now the minister is not in Ottawa. This is how we were able to plug him in and that is how the committees are operating at this time.
Continuing with this, we'll have our witnesses. We'll have the minister for the first hour. Because we have a late start, I believe the minister has one hour. Then we'll go into a second round with officials.
I'll check with the committee members now if we want to go beyond 5:30. If we're going to end at 5:30, we need a few minutes at the end to do the actual process for reporting the mains back. We'll probably stop testimony then at about a quarter past five, if that works. I do have an item at the end related to our travel submission for our fall travel that I'd like to also deal with because the deadline is Friday and we're not sitting on Friday.
That will be the order for the afternoon.
Now, I think everybody has been around the block enough times. We know the rules about addressing questions through the chair. For those online, use the “raise hand” function. You have to mute yourself and you can use the translation features.
To get the show on the road, Minister, we'll go to you for your five-minute opening statement. I'll signal you when the five minutes are up and then we'll get right into our rounds of questions.
Before we get into that, I'll welcome Mr. Doherty, Mr. McLean and Ms. Sidhu to our natural resources committee today.
Mr. Minister.