Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. That's what it's required for, yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, because then what you want to do is give it every chance to survive and every chance to thrive, so you would want to take this opportunity in a way. Now that everything has been cleared out, you can actually do the soil remediation because half the work is done.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  As I said, there is no public information about phase two of the visitor centre, so I'm in the dark.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would like to refer to the comment, the memo that was read out by the chair. In fairness, this person responded on a 24-hour basis to a request from PSPC, provided a very quick response and was not able to produce a report with the full methodology and caveats that would normal

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It certainly can. The only problem is that to get there in 10, 12 or 13 years, everything there, including the elm, has to be cut down. We are hoping that the government would be open to considering alternatives and that instead of building the next part of their visitor centre u

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We're very much at a disadvantage, because there's no public information on what the plans are. We just don't know. We're just shooting in the dark here. We can infer from the fact that we're told all those trees are in the middle of an excavation area that the plan is to exten

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No. I think there are non-invasive ways in which the tree could be further tested. Even in this memo that the chair read out.... Further testing could be done in a way that would determine whether there's any disease in this elm, and in a non-invasive way.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It really depends on the subsoil conditions, I think, but one of the tests or one of the procedures that can be done, for example, is to actually map it out. There's equipment now that you can use that would map out the actual root extent of the tree.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think that's an engineering question. It's possible to tunnel under the whole city of Ottawa to put in an LRT, so maybe you can tunnel under here to do a visitor centre, but....

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, the other trees aren't elms.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I believe they're Norway maples, but I'm not a tree identification specialist.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  They've already been removed.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The only tree that remains right now—that we can see, anyway, from beyond the fencing—is the elm.