Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll make two points and then I'll pass it on to Ms. Garrett for some additional detail. The visitor welcome centre has been an important part of the long-term vision and plan for some time and has been in public documents for probably longer than a decade, I would say. We've made efforts to communicate that to parliamentarians and the broader public.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll have to get back to you on the specifics of that, but the long-term plan, working with Parliament on what services you need, is to have an interconnected campus where, for example, Wellington Street is less of a barrier within the campus, and the Wellington Building, the Sir John A.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, I would say that maybe the best answer to that, in a way, is yes and no, in the sense that the concept of a visitor welcome centre I think dates back to 1976 with the Abbott commission. There's a long-standing discussion around a visitor centre. As the security and threat environment has continued to evolve, the importance of it being a security element outside of the footprint of the core Parliament Buildings has increasingly become important.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The reading and railway rooms?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Oh, sorry. At this point, those are considered temporary buildings. For the Rideau Committee Rooms, I think we have a lease in place until something like 2034 with the National Capital Commission, so they were planned as temporary accommodations.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's just during the construction phase.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's not permanent at all, no.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That would be all underground. The entrance would be as close.... So, you'd walk up South Drive, for example, and you would enter in almost at grade. There would be a slight downslope to enter into the facility, and essentially the Vaux wall would be on top of that facility, so the look and feel of the Hill would return to what it is today.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Those are two important questions. One thing we could consider, if it were something that Parliament wanted, is a phasing of the visitor welcome centre in the Centre Block. It would be possible to open the visitor welcome centre perhaps significantly ahead of the Centre Block. We haven't really looked at that in a detailed way yet, but if it were a desire of Parliament to phase that, then the visitor welcome centre could open in advance.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't think it's ever been considered in a serious way. I think there have been some exploratory elements. We have looked at removing surface parking, which is a principle of the long-term vision and plan. For the most part, most of the feasibility, I'll call it, has looked more at the western area of the campus rather than the front lawn.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That option illustrates the challenge, I think. It's not an option that we're saying or advocating should be implemented. We're working on a broad range of options. What that indicates is that if the House wants to maintain its existing set up, that's essentially how to make it work.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are a couple of really critical things. One is that there are insufficient stairs and elevators in the Centre Block. They will take up significant space. If you look at an example of the West Block, the amount of space required for mechanical space increased fourteenfold as we moved from the previous building to this modern building.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There's no central air conditioning in the Centre Block. It doesn't meet code in most respects. Bringing it up to code takes space, and modernizing it as well. Making it a modern building so that it will meet modern codes will require space. One of the potential opportunities—and this is the beginning of a conversation—is to leverage the courtyards so that some of that space....

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, exactly. In the future, the goal is precisely to have a parliamentary precinct integrated into the infrastructure and to create buildings connected by tunnels in particular.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, it's exactly the same thing. The same idea applies to the Wellington and Sir John A. Macdonald buildings, as well as the Confederation and Justice buildings.