Transport committee  Good afternoon. The dredging market in Quebec is very small. We are talking about some 200,000 cubic metres out of a total 3 million cubic metres in Canada. The dredging season is very short—from April to June and from September to November. There are not many major contracts. A

Transport committee  Any additional money that serves to strengthen the maritime system would be welcome. Currently, some east-coast ports, in Quebec, are in a sad state in a number of respects. We have activities in all those ports. The port of Quebec City, which is one of the oldest, has difficulty

Transport committee  We do not represent ports. So the projects are not—

Transport committee  It could certainly include dredging work, for example. Perhaps it would be appropriate to amend the program so that more projects could be included; $100 million is a lot of money. At the same time, it is not a lot given the scale of the work that needs to be done. With the excep

Transport committee  We are not asking for a new agency to be created, but we are asking that there be real oversight, culminating in final permission from Transport Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada. It is not complicated.

Transport committee  If it is involved in cabotage, the sailors have to be Canadian. There is that slight difference.

Transport committee  Do you mean staff of Transport Canada or...?

Transport committee  Before they signed the agreement, we were not consulted at all, but for the implementation we asked several times for meetings. We got information meetings.

Transport committee  It's all the same. They're Belgian and Dutch, and not only in Quebec. It's all over Canada.

Transport committee  We do. We have contracts in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the British Virgin Islands.

Transport committee  Yes, with Canadian crews.

Transport committee  I can answer that as it pertains to dredging. As we explained just now, Europe is not so far away: you have Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Guadeloupe and St. Martin. We already have a presence in those areas and we are competing with European dredgers right now. They choose the bigge

Transport committee  There is so much to do there that you need a lot of equipment. In order to get there, the transportation costs would be too high. Anyway, they already take care of their own market over there.

Transport committee  Exactly.

Transport committee  For the time being, we don't know what the situation is there. The mapping of the North is not complete. There may be high volumes, but right now, the routes in demand are those that are navigable right now. That's still a long way away and it requires extensive mobilization. In