Mr. Speaker, since 2004, as member for the riding of Berthier—Maskinongé, I have spoken several times in this House on the matter of shells in Lake Saint-Pierre, which has been recognized as a world biosphere reserve by UNESCO.
Last June, I tabled a petition with over 4,800 signatures asking the government to remove some 300,000 shells—8,000 of them unexploded—abandoned by the Department of National Defence at the bottom of Lake Saint-Pierre.
On September 25, we learned that the Department of National Defence had reached an agreement with a specialized company to carry out a study on removing these shells. We should not get too excited because the federal government has held out these studies on several occasions, and then not taken action.
Let us hope that this will be the last study. It is time to take concrete action to remove the shells once and for all.