Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker and Madam Clerk, for being here. I think you're witnessing a full court press.
First of all, for their exceptional arguments in support of naming this room the Veterans Room, I would like to commend my colleagues who have already spoken.
In my opinion, this room is a beautiful room. It's smallish, but it's a beautiful room. After the Salon de la Francophonie, the very ornate one off the Senate foyer, I think this is the prettiest room in the Centre Block.
If I take one word from my three colleagues who've already spoken, you can't really associate faces with most of the committees of the House of Commons, important as they are--finance, transportation, environment. There are constituencies--environmental constituencies, railway constituencies, and so on and so forth--but you really can't associate faces. You certainly can with veterans. We're dealing with faces and people.
As my colleagues have already said, it's not about memorializing, because this is very much a place for the living. It's a functional room. I do not see it as our exclusive preserve; we may be more often here than elsewhere, but we understand that with the limitations of space, we're going to share this room with other committees as the schedules require. That having been said, we could still have a home room, so to speak, with that name, and as Mr. Stoffer has said, it could be decorated appropriately to the theme.
I'm not a founding member of the committee, as are Mr. Valley and some others, but certainly since I've been on this committee we've been dealing more with the human side of our parliamentary business. It's not technical, really. I mean that it's not very technical; it's very much the human piece. I have had the good fortune of sponsoring some days of commemoration and of realizing that the more commemoration we have, the stronger it makes the spirit of commemoration; I think that in the same way, having a place for the living to come and share their stories is very important.
You'll make your decision, and we will certainly accept whatever it is, but we wanted to be sure that no stone was left unturned in our efforts to see this room, which is very much a working room, renamed. There would be hardly any expense involved. I'm sure we could get some very appropriate pieces from the art bank, and we've had offers--for example, Ms. Hinton's offer. We would certainly take the advice of whoever the official decorator is for the House of Commons, should this ever happen, to make sure that the name and decoration are very appropriate to the kinds of people we serve as veterans affairs committee members.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.