Mr. Chair, again I go back to my colleague's preamble. In consultation with my counterpart in the British Columbia government, there has been recognition that the decision to consolidate offices from six to two and the provisions to continue our environmental service to lead agencies with regard to spill has been accepted as a sound and logical decision.
With regard to the second part of the question, our government believes that taxpayer-funded scientists should focus their efforts on taxpayer-funded research. We do enable thousands of interviews across government every year with our scientists, with reasonable media requests.
However, we believe that a demand to meet a 60 minute deadline by an individual reporter is simply not acceptable. We will continue to work with the media on reasonable requests. Again, I would expect many thousand more interviews in the year ahead.