Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm also happy to join my colleagues today in speaking about protecting the health of our water and our environment as a whole. In doing so, Mr. Speaker, I'm reminded of the time some 29 years ago when my family and I took our long flight from Seoul, South Korea, to Yellowknife via Osaka, Japan, Vancouver, Edmonton to Yellowknife. I was a young girl and there were certain things I took for granted as being unchangeable cardinal rules that I had to revisit upon arrival in Yellowknife. Such as there are four seasons of even three months in a calendar year or that the sun goes down by 6:00 p.m., even in the middle of the summer. Of course, coming to the land of the midnight sun, it was something I had to change my thinking on, and those are pretty fundamental changes at that age. But one that I would always remember and one that I never thought would change is the sight of countless white spots that I could see from the air. We couldn't figure out what they were until we landed and we had to ask around. We finally figured out these were the frozen lakes in the early spring of May. Coming from the world where there had been summer for a couple of months, I didn't realize that there were so many lakes and that they would still be frozen. Of course, where I come from, there were two-thirds of land mass are mountains with rivers and streams running through them.

One thing, Mr. Speaker, that I also learned and I still can't get over is how big Great Slave Lake is. It's actually almost probably as big as the country of 40 million people that I came from. I always thought that even if everything else changed in the world, that we would always have the water that we could rely on as long as I lived. But almost 30 years later, that is all changing.

Mr. Speaker, one thing I didn't know then but I do know now is that we also live downstream from Alberta. In early '90s various sawmills and timber production companies were the ones that were contaminating our water, but now the insatiable appetite for water in oil sands is making those issues small in comparison. Mr. Speaker, may I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement?