Mr. Chair, that is a really good question.
As the custodian of the site and the person responsible for maintaining the site, restoring or repairing the site when it needs to be repaired and working with the NCC to maintain the lawn around the site, I note that the monument has never been fenced in, other than, as my colleague Mr. Stephen Harris mentioned, for crowd control, with a lower, three-feet tall fence. It's a shame, in our view, to have to fence around a monument to protect it. It's also a public place to allow more than a million people to pay their respects to those who have given their lives to make this country what it is today.
Our objective is to make this site as open as possible for people to come to pay their respects. At the same time, as I said, we're maintaining the site; we're not the people policing the site or enforcing the law. It's a balance that's hard to maintain, and we really rely on the police force to tell us.... As with what happened on February 4, we can't ensure the security of the site and close it in. On February 12, when the fence was removed, we were thinking about putting the fence back up. Again, we talked to all of our partners about this and we were told that it could be worse putting a fence up than leaving it off. A decision was made at the time based on the police force's recommendation to leave it off.
It is a balance this committee could look at: access for the public versus fencing the monument in and preventing public access to it.