Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to our witnesses.
I apologize that I missed the preamble, as I was sitting in on the ethics committee. I can guarantee you they won't have to worry about naming a room after that committee.
If we do decide to name this the Veterans Room, we need to find some room in our budget for the HVAC system and fix it as well.
But seriously, I hear your concerns and understand the predicament you're in. In line with what my honourable colleague Betty Hinton and the chair mentioned, this isn't a meeting place. When I was reflecting on our first discussion of this, I was thinking it should be the centre of the Parliament; the biggest room in this building should be named after the veterans. Without them, as was alluded to, we wouldn't have the freedom we have, the democracy, and the wonderful country that we call Canada.
Just recently, last week, I was reading a survey. It was a national poll, and it said that veterans are concerned that by the year 2035 Canadians will forget about them. That's a short 27 years away. As you know, we only have one survivor of World War I, and we need to not only honour and respect, but remember our veterans.
I appreciate the offer to decorate and I also hear what you're saying about setting that precedent. But I believe that, to use that argument, nothing would ever get accomplished. We have to look at each application on its own merits, and this would be significant, in my mind, just to recognize the vets. As we know, nothing is free; there's a cost to freedom. As Minister Thompson has said many times, nothing unites us more than our veterans. So I think this is a great opportunity to do both: to honour and respect and to remember our veterans.
Thank you.