Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the extra minute as well. I appreciate that.
To all the witnesses, thanks very much for your testimony this afternoon/evening. It really hits home for a riding like Essex. I like to call ourselves an island, so to speak. I know we're not, but we're awfully close to one when we have Lake St. Clair, a relatively small body of water compared with the Great Lakes, and the Detroit River, which is very narrow and not very deep, and then Lake Erie, a much larger lake and of course one of the Great Lakes.
In the shipping channels of Lake Erie, the ships are quite a distance from shore. I know this because I like to go out there and fish for walleye near the shipping channels. However, we also have the Detroit River. Along that same river line, so many needed goods are brought in and taken away, right down to Oreo cookies, which are manufactured in the United States from our grain from southwestern Ontario.
All of that is to say to the committee that our shipping industry is absolutely vital. Whatever we can do to ensure that the shipping industry is helped out along the way to continue to move commerce will be darn important. This study is a very important study.
I want to say thank you to Mr. Bryant and through him to Mr. Byrne, CAO of the Essex Region Conservation Authority, or ERCA. He has worked with the authority for as long as I can remember and has done some amazing work on so many various functions of ERCA.
Mr. Bryant, you spoke about flood mapping program funding. I believe it to be true that the last time an erosion study was done in the region of Essex, which of course is much larger than Essex—it includes Windsor West, Windsor-Tecumseh, and Chatham, and probably all the way up to Sarnia—was 1975. It was commissioned in 1975 and completed in 1976. Ironically, that was the year I was born. I'm really dating myself now.
Is it fair to say, Mr. Bryant, that this was the last time the erosion portion of the study was completed?