Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to the 75th meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages.
As you can see, our committee chair is not here. Consequently, as the committee's first vice-chair, I will have the pleasure of chairing the meeting, and I therefore beg your indulgence.
As you are committee regulars here, I will spare you the instructions, unless you want to hear them. I would like to remind you, however, of one important point. Although this room is equipped with a good sound system, sound feedback may occur, which can be extremely harmful to interpreters and cause serious injury.
The most common cause of audio feedback is an earpiece being placed too close to a microphone. So we ask all participants to exercise great caution when handling their earpiece, especially when their microphone or that of the person sitting next to them is on.
In order to prevent incidents and to protect the hearing health of our esteemed interpreters, I ask participants to make sure that they speak into the microphone assigned to them and that they avoid holding their earpiece in their hands when it is not in use. The earpiece should be placed on the table, away from the microphone. Thank you for your attention to this instruction.
I would now like to welcome Mr. Stéphane Lauzon… Actually, he's not here at the moment.