Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Bonjour. My name is Alain Bouchard. I am founder and executive chairman of the board of Alimentation Couche-Tard. I'm pleased to welcome you here to our annual general and special shareholders' meeting. I declare this meeting open. In accordance with the company's bylaws, as executive chairman of the board, I shall chair this meeting. Valéry Zamuner, corporate secretary of the company, will serve as secretary for this meeting. Valéry? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Since the meeting is being held virtually through a live audio webcast, we believe it is necessary to set a few rules for it to run smoothly. The agenda of the meeting includes, 1, the receipt of our audited consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ended April 24, 2022, together with the auditor's report. 2, the appointment of auditors. 3, the election of directors. 4, an administrative vote on our executive compensation policy. 5, the adoption of a special resolution authorizing the company to amend its articles of incorporation in order to create a new class of shares and convert each of the current shares issued and outstanding Class A multiple voting shares into a new class of shares. 6, the vote on the 4 shareholder proposals received from a shareholder this year. Details of these matters are outlined in the management proxy circular. The chairman will present all the proposals. They will not need to be seconded. Only holders of record as of July 5, 2022, or their duly appointed proxies who are registered with our transfer agent and have obtained a control number prior to this meeting may participate, ask questions, or vote at the meeting. All others may attend the meeting as guests. Scheduled media interviews will be taking place after this meeting, so we would like to ask media to hold their questions until then. At the appropriate time, shareholders or their duly appointed proxies will be asked to vote on the virtual meeting platform after all items on the agenda have been presented. You will have a limited time to do this. If you have already voted and you vote on the meeting platform, it will change your previous vote. Registered shareholders and duly registered proxies who have already voted do not need to vote again unless they wish to change their vote. Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxies who wish to communicate with members of the executive team or the board or who wish to ask a question may do so asking or using the instant messaging service provided on the virtual meeting platform. There are two ways to ask questions during the meeting. Questions can be submitted in writing by using the relevant dialog box in the function Ask a Question during the meeting. Questions may also be asked over the phone. To do so, the shareholder or proxy holder will need to submit their name and phone number by using the relevant dialog box in the function Messaging during the meeting in order to be reached by telephone at the appropriate time. Your telephone number will not be shared with other meeting attendees. Only shareholders and duly appointed and registered proxy holders may ask questions during the question period. When asking a question, please indicate your name and the entity that you represent, if any, and confirm that you are a registered shareholder or a duly appointed proxy. Please also indicate to which member of our leadership team you wish to address in your question. Questions will generally be received shortly after being submitted, but will be dealt with only at the end of the question period or during question period at the end of the meeting. Answers will not be provided to questions that have already been answered or that are redundant or repetitive. I wish to advise you that some of the topics discussed during the presentations following the legal part of the meeting may constitute forward-looking statements issued by the company with the usual provisions. Details of the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements may be found in the Alimentation Couche-Tard management discussion and analysis for the 2022 fiscal year, which is available on SEDAR and on the company's website. We shall now proceed. Thank you, Valéry. I now appoint as scrutineers of this meeting the TSX Trust Company Canada, as represented today by Mr. Mathias Jalali and Ms. Isabelle Vachon. The secretary has informed me that we have received from TSX Trust Company the confirmation that it has sent the documents out regarding the meeting to all shareholders of record on the company's books as of July 29, 2022. I am instructing the secretary, therefore, to keep these documents in the company's records with the affidavit from the TSX Trust Company, confirming that they have been sent to Couche-Tard's shareholders. The scrutineer has submitted to me the report on attendance at the meeting. This shows that quorum has been reached. I ask the secretary to attach the scrutineer's report to the minutes of this meeting. Accordingly, I declare this meeting duly convened and legally constituted to conduct the business for which it was called. The first item on our agenda regards receipt of the company's financial statements. I now submit for receipt the consolidated financial statement of Alimentation Couche-Tard and its subsidiaries for the fiscal year ended April 24th, 2022, as well as the auditor's report on these financial statements. We will cover these statements during the presentation by our chief financial officer, and we will therefore answer your question at that time. The next item on our agenda concerns the appointment of auditors for the current fiscal year and the authorization provided to the board of directors to set their compensation. As indicated in this circular, the company recommends the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, a firm of chartered professional accountants, until the next annual meeting of Alimentation Couche-Tard. I propose that PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, be appointed auditor of the company and that the board of directors be authorized to set the auditor's compensation. As indicated in the circular, the board of directors has set the number of directors to be elected today at 16. Biographical notes on the candidates, all candidates, are included in the management proxy circular and made available to our shareholders. I shall now introduce the 16 people who have been nominated. Louis Vachon, Board Member since 2021 and Lead Director. Jean Bernier, Board Member since 2019. Karinne Bouchard, Board Member since 2021. Eric Boyko, Board Member since 2017. Jacques D'Amours, Co-founder and Board Member since 1988. Janice L. Fields, Board Member since 2020. Eric Fortin, Board Member since 2021. Richard Fortin, Co-founder and Board Member since 1988. Brian Hannasch, Board Member and President and Chief Executive Officer of the company since 2014. Mélanie Kau, Board Member since 2006. Marie-Josée Lamothe, Board Member since 2019. Monique F. Leroux, Board Member since 2015. Réal Plourde, Co-founder and Board Member since 1988. Daniel Rabinowicz, Board Member since 2013. Louis Têtu, Board Member since 2019. Finally, myself, Alain Bouchard, Co-founder, Board Member since 1988 and Executive Chairman of the Board. Each candidate has indicated their desire to serve as a director of the company. I propose that each of these individuals be elected as a director of the company until the close of the next annual shareholders meeting or until a successor is duly elected or appointed. As mentioned at the start of the meeting, votes will be cast today through a single electronic ballot. After the items on the agenda have been presented, we will therefore continue with the next item on the agenda. You will be asked to vote on the election of each director and shortly afterwards, on all other matters to be voted upon. The next item on the agenda is the advisory vote on the board of directors' executive compensation policy. We are pleased to offer our shareholders the opportunity to express their views on compensation for executive members, given that we are committed to maintaining an active and continuous communication process with you. We are confident that you will judge the company's executive compensation program to be based on a performance-based approach aligned with our shareholders' long-term interests. The result of the vote will not be binding on the board. However, when examining the company's approach to compensation in the future, the board will take account of this result and of other comments from shareholders. The full text of the advisory resolution appears in the management proxy circular. I propose the adoption of the advisory resolution concerning the company's executive compensation practices set out in the management proxy circular. The next on the agenda is the consideration and adoption of a special resolution authorizing the company to amend its articles of incorporation in order to create a new class of shares, namely an unlimited number of common shares, and to convert each of the current issued and outstanding Class A multiple voting shares of the company into one common share of the company. Simply to simplify things, a detailed description of such special resolutions is located in the company's management proxy circular. Therefore, I propose adopting such special resolutions authorizing the amendment of the company's articles of incorporation as set out in the management proxy circular. The next item on the agenda concerns the four shareholder proposals submitted to the meeting by MÉDAC, as represented by Mr. Willie Gagnon. These proposals relate to, one, adopting French in the articles of incorporation as the official language of the company. Two, the board of directors assessing means to increase employee participation in the board's decision-making. Three, the company publishing on an annual basis in the form it sees fit, a report on the representation of women in management positions from entry-level positions to senior-level positions. Four, the company putting in place the necessary means to prevent a takeover of the company, either hostile or not. The company has reproduced in annex, appendix C of its management proxy circular, the full text of each of these proposals and of the presentation that the shareholder MÉDAC translated to us. The said text has not been modified at all other than to translate into English, since they were provided in French only. Appendix D of the management proxy circular also contains the company's response to MÉDAC's proposals. We would like to say that up until the end of 2022, we present that 29% of our executives and 30% of the people who, in our opinion, have the potential to become executives are women. Women occupied 20.8% of the vice presidential level employees and represents another 45% of people who, in our opinion, have the potential to become vice presidents. Furthermore, thirty percent of our directors and forty-two percent of our manager, office managers, forty-six percent of our manager, market managers, and seventy percent of our store managers are women. We've got nineteen percent of our heads, thirty percent of directors, forty-two percent of office managers, forty-six percent of market managers, and seventy percent of store managers. Couche-Tard supports the spirit and intent of human rights and anti-discrimination laws and promotes a culture of acceptance and respect as set out in Couche-Tard's ethics, Code of Ethics, and Code of Conduct. In alignment with this commitment, the corporation aspires to become or to maintain a board composition in which women represent at least 30% of its members. We're proud to say that we have already, you know, reached this two years ago. With regards to proposal number four, I'd like to say that notwithstanding the abolition of the multiple voting share plan in the last year and considering the size of our corporation, the means offered by the legislative framework and the fact that the founding shareholders continue to maintain over 23% of voting shares, we do not consider the corporation a vulnerable target subject to a hostile takeover. Although the company shares MÉDAC's position on the importance of each of these issues and the company's disclosure of its approach to them, the company is of the opinion that its practices in each area and our disclosure already meet all regulatory requirements and invites shareholders to vote against these four proposals. Mr. Gagnon would like to address the assembly and speak to the MÉDAC proposals. Mr. Gagnon, you have four minutes to speak to the proposals. Yes. Hello, Mr. Chair. Can you hear me clearly? Yes, we can hear you very clearly, Mr. Gagnon. Yes, hello. I'm happy to see you again after two years. My name is Willie Gagnon, and I work with the MÉDAC. The proposals were clearly presented by yourself and yourselves. We are happy to present them today. We invite all shareholders to support all four. We'd like to see French. It was not possible to get that. That's why we are moving to a vote on the proposal. Obviously, we discussed all of this with higher management of the company, but we also ask that the company look at formalizing its report, its connection with employees, when it comes to best practices around the world, including best governance in the U.K. The company has not responded to our formal request, but we're happy to read the response in the circular, and so we ask as shareholders to support our proposal. What we have to say about women, it's not reaching the number, but giving information on the different percentages in all of the positions that we have asked about, the positions are in a list, and we hope that things will improve over the years, and we ask shareholders to support this. When it comes to the company protecting itself, we want the company to put things in place to protect itself. We are against the abolition of the multiple voting shares plan. We hope to be able to say that shareholders will vote against this proposal number five. We invite all shareholders to vote in favor of our proposal. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Gagnon, for your comments with regards to proposals to shareholders. We will now vote using a single electronic ballot. I remind you that the items to be voted on are, 1, the appointment of auditors. 2, the election of directors. 3, an advisory vote on their executive compensation policy. 4, the concent... The consideration of adopting a special resolution authorizing the company to amend its articles of incorporation in order to create a new class of shares and to convert each of the current issued and outstanding Class A multiple voting shares into the new class of shares. Five, to vote on the four shareholder proposals received from a shareholder this year. You will now be asked to vote on each of the five items on the agenda. At that point, please go to the voting page and click on the For or Abstain button next to the resolution to appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP as the company's auditor. Then click on For or Abstain next to the name of each candidate to the board of directors. Third, press the For or Against button next to the advisory resolution on the company's executive compensation practices. Click then on For or Against, when it comes to approving the amendment of the articles of incorporation. Finally, click on the buttons For or Against next to each of the four shareholder proposals. Once the voting is complete, the voting page will disappear, and your votes will automatically be recorded. We will now give you just a few minutes to fill out your electronic voting, ballot. We will start again at the end of the vote. Thank you for your patience. I have received the scrutineer's report on the voting results, and I confirm the following. I am pleased to announce that the resolution on the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the advisory resolution on the company's executive compensation practices have been adopted. Regarding the election of directors, Louis Vachon, Jean Bernier, Karinne Bouchard, Eric Boyko, Jacques D'Amours, Janice L. Fields, Eric Fortin, Richard Fortin, Brian Hannasch, Mélanie Kau, Marie-Josée Lamothe, Monique F. Leroux, Réal Plourde, Daniel Rabinowicz, Louis Têtu, and myself have been duly elected as directors of the company. I am pleased to announce that the board's approach to executive compensation of upper management has been adopted and that the special resolution approving the amendments to the company's articles of incorporation has been also adopted. Finally, regarding the four shareholder proposals submitted, I wish to announce that each proposal was rejected as recommended by the company. Details of the results will be available shortly on the SEDAR website and on the company's website. With the legal formalities now completed, it is time to close the meeting and move on to the corporate presentations. I therefore declare the formal meeting closed. This year has been another one for the history books. A year in which the worst of times brought out the best of Alimentation Couche-Tard, the best in our company and the best in our people as they showed outstanding care and commitment to each other, our customers as well, and the business. In the 42 years since founding Couche-Tard, I have never been prouder than I am this year. A year ago, I was very optimistic that we were seeing the waning days of the pandemic, and that we would soon be getting back to a new normal. However, this year was marked by difficult surges of COVID-19 variants, unrivaled economic challenges, and a tragic war and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, directly impacting our Eastern European and Scandinavian business units, and heartbreaking to us all. Yet, in the face of this incredible disruption, we had a year of incredible achievements and recognition of our winning culture. I must admit that I was moved to tears when I found out that ACT was named to Forbes 2021 list of the world's best employers. We stood out as the only Canadian retailer among the 750 companies recognized worldwide. That was soon followed by ACT receiving the 2022 Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award. This is the first time that we have been honored by Gallup, which recognizes the world's most engaged workplace cultures, and we are the only convenience retailer included in this year's honorees. Following the Gallup announcement, I wrote to my leadership team that I was dreaming of seeing such a day when we would be recognized for our culture of empowerment and focus on our people. By remaining steadfast in our focus on the business and on this culture of doing the right thing for our people and our customers, we have experienced tremendous growth over the years. These years of transformation especially prepared us to face adversity while keeping our fundamental principles top of mind. In the face of escalating COVID cases, we kept our stores safe and our team members healthy and vaccinated. In the face of war and its devastating human impact, we suspended our operations in Russia and cared for tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees by offering food, beverages, housing, and generous contributions to the Red Cross through a global fundraising effort. I must say that I am especially proud of our efforts to support our communities. Most of all, the heroic work done by our Polish and Baltic team members to help Ukrainian refugees with needed supplies. Finally, in the face of unprecedented inflation, employment, and supply chain challenges, we also had record-breaking results across key metrics and remained focused on our strategic and financial goals. We have also stayed true to our DNA, which has been characterized by growth since our very beginnings. Over the decades, sizable acquisitions have fueled that growth, much of which was slowed down by the pandemic and inflated multiples. I can assure you that we continue to be actively on the lookout for opportunities and are well prepared with our strong balance sheet to pursue the right fits when they arise. As always, we will stay true to our customary financial discipline as we move forward on our vision to become the world's leader in convenience and mobility. Also essential is accelerating organic growth, and I am proud of our progress here. Despite shortages in construction material and workers, we built and remodeled a record number of new stores across the network, allowing us to grow our exclusive and compelling offerings inside our stores as well as on our forecourts. Our entrepreneurial and innovative spirit was not slowed down by the historic hurdles of the year. In fact, we moved full speed by investing massively in shaping the future of convenience on several fronts, from innovative advancements inside our stores and at our pumps, to continuing our active role in the global energy transition by growing our mobility promise, by bringing electric vehicle charging solutions to North America while reaching milestones in Europe. Now, looking toward the future of our planet, we remain committed to our sustainability journey as we further the work and progress on our targets and ambitions. We hold our executive sponsors accountable for our sustainability progress and are committed to transparency in reporting as well. Finally, this year was also historic as we ended the special voting rights of ACT's founders. As I predicted at this meeting a year ago, we did not change the way we managed the business, and I remain fully dedicated to the company's strategic success and a good steward of shareholders' trust. In fact, my confidence in the leadership of the business has only grown, and I am more convinced than ever that our size, our winning culture and strategy, and the structures that we have put in place, both at the executive management level and from a governance standpoint, are serving the business well. They clearly did this year, and I know they will for years to come. Speaking for myself and on behalf of the board, I want to conclude by expressing my deepest gratitude to all our people in our stores and support offices, as well as to the support and management teams during another extraordinary and challenging year. I also want to thank you and all our stakeholders for your support and your trust. I will now turn the virtual floor over to Brian Hannasch, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Brian? Thank you, Alain. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I will be here today to talk to you about our financial year. The challenges were immense, from a worsening pandemic and historic inflation, staffing and supply chain obstacles, followed by a war and a heartbreaking humanitarian crisis impacting countries where we live and operate. Yet the rewards were also immense. We reached record-breaking financial success and never wavered from our focus on our strategic priorities. We created strong growth and convenience and mobility, innovated for the future, improved operational excellence, and stayed true to our sustainability journey. Finally, the high point for me, record high engagement scores from our 130,000 team members despite everything going on around us. This engagement is the foundation of our culture. Our culture is a secret sauce that has helped us grow from a single store in Laval, Canada, to one of the world's leaders in convenience and mobility. It's also the backbone that has given us the strength to prosper and lead for decades. Alain Bouchard and his partners started this company 42 years ago with a certain set of guiding values, which has shaped us through the years. This year, we challenged ourselves to verbalize and share these founding principles by creating the values we live by. At Couche-Tard, we are one team. We take ownership, do the right thing, and play to win. These four simple and compelling values are at the heart of our success. Before I go into detail, let me start by sharing some of the highlights of the unprecedented year and the ways in which we created a competitive advantage as we win, play to win. We had record EBITDA of nearly $5.25 billion. We met our rollout and sales objectives for our Fresh Food, Fast and are creating a global food culture. We have brought innovative Smart Checkout technology to the stores, making it easier for our team members and customers. We expanded the footprint of our Circle K Fuel brand and created more value in our supply and fleet capabilities. We reached milestones in our European mobility journey and introduced electric vehicle charging solutions into North America. Finally, we built a record number of new stores and developed a new core prototype store design. There is no higher strategic priority for our business than winning with food. Since launching our Fresh Food, Fast program, we have expanded it to over 4,000 stores globally and will continue broad expansion in fiscal 2023. Two years into the journey, we are seeing strong year-over-year growth, with same store sales exceeding expectations. We are pleased by the acceleration, sales, and engagement of our operators as we refine our offer for our customers. Over the course of the year, we optimized assortment across breakfast, lunch, and mid-afternoon snacking day parts with a variety of hot sandwiches, snacks, and bakery items that are on trend with local and regional consumer tastes. We also finally added chicken to our offering as we launched a variety of great-tasting chicken items, which are generating very strong incremental growth in our stores, and we are expanding that offer across North America. To drive more traffic in North America locations and build on the growth and success of this offer, we launched Sip & Save, a great value beverage subscription program that invites customers to enjoy a hot or cold dispensed beverage every day for a small monthly fee. By year-end, we have signed up more than 450,000 customers, receiving strong positive feedback, and we believe this offer will increase loyalty and traffic to our stores over the long term. We continue to see significant benefit in bringing data analytics to our convenience business, making it simultaneously both more attractive locally and more efficient globally. This past year, we completed the introduction of localized pricing across the network and have seen a clear average gross margin improvement from our efforts. To build on that success, we have conducted assortment and promotional pilots across several business units as we aim to more effectively identify products that are top and bottom performers on a store-by-store basis, adjust our assortment more quickly to meet our local customer needs. This work is showing great promise while making our category managers work easier and more efficient. As we innovate our food and beverage offerings, we continue to improve the customer journey. We are excited by the rollout of Smart Checkout, the next generation AI-powered self-checkout. Through this pioneering technology, the customer places all their items on a tray, and the system scans them instantly. The customer then pays with card or cash and is out the door in substantially less time than it would take using a traditional self-checkout system. By the end of the fiscal year, Smart Checkout was already in nearly 550 Circle K locations in the U.S. and Sweden and will be introduced to more than 700 stores across our network over the next three years. We also now have a fully autonomous checkout experience in eight retrofitted stores in Arizona. Powered by AI and computer vision, a customer simply activates an app and scans a code on their smartphone when they enter the store, grab the products they like, and skip the checkout line completely, with their selections immediately captured and paid for. While frictionless technologies continue to gain momentum on our forecourt as well, our Pay by Plate service, which employs license plate recognition that enables a customer to simply drive up, pump fuel, and drive off without having to present any method of payment, is expanding across Scandinavia. Following its debut last year in Sweden, it's now been launched in Denmark, Norway, and Estonia, and now we are at over 800 of our locations in Europe with an eye toward potential introduction in North America in the near future. Now I will turn to our mobility business, starting with fuel. We made solid progress with our Circle K Fuel brand initiative across North America. By year-end, we added 680 additional sites to the network, bringing our total to 3,000. As we continue to review our network quality, we are encouraged by our customer feedback, especially regarding quality of product, forecourt tidiness, and overall brand identity. Here, we're focusing on our fuel loyalty program, Easy Pay discounts, premium fuel program, and national fuel campaigns to reward our returning and loyal customers and increase overall awareness of the Circle K fuel brand. In this category, we continue to maintain our cost discipline. Despite inflationary pressures to continue to achieve a healthy fuel margin, we have also pursued opportunities to extract more value from every part of the fuel supply chain across the globe, including our partnership in the U.S. with Musket. In a year of unparalleled supply chain disturbances, our global efforts to expand the flexibility and control in our supply chain have been invaluable, allowing us to diversify our supply sources and maintain reliable supply to our customers around the world. As we strive to integrate even more sustainable solutions into our value proposition, we expanded our renewable fuel offering, including 100% renewable blends to all of our markets. An example, in Denmark, our innovative work included Europe's first truck that runs on e-Methanol, a Power-to-X fuel that is 100% renewable. This year, we also probably strengthened our relationship with our B2B customers in Europe, and we have begun to grow these customer relationships in North America, where we see a significant opportunity as we expand our network under the Circle K brand. Also in mobility our real-life Norway lab continues to deliver a significant advantage as we peer into the future and gain meaningful insight and benefits to claim the EV customer. In Europe we reached several milestones over the past year, including nearly 1,100 chargers at nearly 260 locations. In Norway, we maintained our position as a number one charging destination and continued steady network expansion in Denmark, Ireland and Sweden, bringing to market several destination stores complete with a full food offering and our new branding, improved the rest areas with rapid Wi-Fi to cater to our mobility customers. We also complement our forecourt offering by delivering more than 7,800 home and workplace chargers in Norway. Our growing customer base also helps make our business resilient with strong demand from both the consumer and the B2B customer. Having firmly established ourselves at the forefront of mobility in many of our European markets, we've begun bringing EV charging to North America customers. Starting with our first EV charging station in Austin, Texas, supplied with Tesla's partner Superchargers. Following that, we deployed our first Circle K and Couche-Tard branded EV chargers to our stations in South Carolina and here in Quebec. In the coming year, we will accelerate this North American deployment with branded charging solutions in strategic markets in both Canada and the U.S., and we'll evaluate how we can continue to leverage our global learnings, our partnerships, and the scale we have to improve the customer experience and ultimately win the consumer in this space. Network optimization and organic development continue to be a key to our Double Again growth strategy. This year was a record in one in terms of new store builds with an addition of nearly 135 new stores. The ongoing strengthening of our network development team, combined with our efforts to improve our deployment, design and entitlement process, have resulted in a very robust pipeline for future store openings. Despite severe supply chain challenges combined with significant inflationary cost increases, our development teams have worked hard not only to deliver a record year on new store builds, but also be successful in renovating existing stores. The team has developed a new core prototype store design, which we value-engineered to deliver reduced cost and quicker build time, all this contributing value to our current and our future growth. We also strengthened the network through complementary acquisitions, including a total of 74 locations, solidifying our presence in several key markets, as well as securing significant proceeds from the sale of nearly 200 non-strategic and surplus parcels. Following these transactions, our network is well positioned for future growth. To place our employees and customers at the forefront of everything we do, we have embraced an operations first mindset globally, focused on enhancing the quality of the store experience and staffing our operations with effective, engaged, and satisfied teams. In the past year, we have explored and introduced solutions that focus on operational efficiency, staffing and inventory management, and customer experience. Through our Easy Office initiative, we're working on reducing time spent on tasks that keep our store managers in the back office. Using concepts and processes tested and proven at our operations innovation pilot stores, we've eliminated nearly one-third of the hours spent on administrative functions and expect to increase this figure to nearly 50% in the coming year as we expand the initiative across North America and Europe. The biggest time savings initiatives to date have come through the rollout of nearly 5,500 smart safes in the U.S. and Canada, which enable managers to streamline their daily cash handling processes, eliminating daily bank deposits while also improving our cash controls. We're also even eliminating the back office altogether, bringing manager workstations to the front of the store where the manager can coach and support their teams and engage with customers. This approach started in our Northern Tier business unit, and we've now expanded it to nearly 1,000 North America stores and another 400 stores throughout our business in Ireland. Across our European market, even in the face of continued COVID challenges, we received great feedback from our customers and see a continued strong performance in our store operations. We've also pushed forward our pioneering gaming initiatives to successfully drive traffic to our locations. To help combat the historic staffing challenges this year, we focused on multiple solutions. We took targeted actions on variable compensation structures, retention initiatives, and training and benefit programs, working with our businesses to tailor our competitive environments, implement and closely track the solutions that are working. We also stepped up our leadership development programs, instituting the first-ever training program for regional directors of operations and our market managers. Our award-winning gamified training program was expanded to more geographies and levels of our store team members. Through these and other efforts, we saw a noticeable improvement by year-end, particularly in North America, where we saw progress in turnover trends at all levels of our operations team, including store managers, assistant managers, and our customer service team members. Once again, we came together one team this year to protect our employees and our customers while providing needed support to our communities. In the end, our winning culture was proudly recognized from prestigious organizations considering employee engagement and satisfaction. Guided by our value to do the right thing, the focus on sustainability ambitions remained steadfast through the year. While solidifying sustainability as a strategic lens to our business, we continue to anchor our journey in support of a cleaner, healthier, and more equitable future for everyone and progress in our targets supporting people, our planet, and its prosperity. Again, we aim to be transparent in our sustainability efforts and this extensive reporting of our work, as well as the initial year financing of our sustainable initiatives through our Green Bond offering, which we are proud to say was a first for a convenience and fuel retailer. In conclusion, I want to end where Alain started his remarks by saying that while this year has clearly seen the worst of times, it's also brought out the best in Couche-Tard. I'm confident our winning culture, guided by the values we live by, is ready for another successful year ahead. I want to say thank you to all of our team members, our customers, and our shareholders for working together with us, taking ownership, doing the right thing, and playing to win. With that, I'll now turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Claude Tessier, to provide further details. Yes, Brian. For financial performance since 2012, the following indicators represent all of the information that has been in place for shareholders. As you can see, total gross profit has grown at an annualized rate of 14% since 2012 and by nearly 9% over the past year to more than $111 billion, even as we have faced changes associated with the pandemic, inflation, and various supply chain issues, among others. In addition, since 2012, our EBITDA has grown at an annualized rate of more than 20%, and our adjusted diluted earnings per share have grown at an annualized rate of nearly 21% to reach nearly $5.25 billion and $2.60 per share, respectively, which is a perfect demonstration of our operating leverage. Finally, shareholders equity, a good indicator of value creation, has grown by more than 19% per year since 2012 and by 2.1% in the past year to reach nearly CAD 12.5 billion. When it comes to growth in EBITDA since 2000, you can see that the long-lasting equation that has been in place for more than a decade is there. The equation of strong revenues and gross profit generation, combined with exceptional operational skills and very good cost control discipline, has resulted in a long streak of excellent performance by generating EBITDA growth of almost 20% annually since 2020. It is remarkable to see the starting point of 100 million in 2000 and how much we have come to achieve an EBITDA of approximately $5.25 billion this year. Over the past 10 years, Alimentation Couche-Tard shares have increased in value by 617%, far outperforming the main benchmark indexes in North America. It is interesting to note that an investment of $1,000 in Alimentation Couche-Tard shares made 36 years ago, more specifically at the time of our initial public offering on August 22, 1986, would be worth approximately $1.3 million today based on the share price at the close of trading on August 15, not counting the return from dividends paid over the years. In 2022, organic growth in our merchandise and services category continued its positive trend due to the continued development of our global Circle K brand, further enhancements to our product offering and assortment such as the Fresh Food, Fast program. Overall, merchandise and services revenues and gross margin increased by 4.6% and 2.5%, respectively, compared to the previous year. Excluding the net impact from currency variation, the increases would have been 3.9% and 6%, respectively. Same-store sales increased by 1.9% in the U.S. and 5.9% in Europe and other regions, and this decreased by 3.5% in Canada. These results were driven by a number of organic growth initiatives, including our private brand initiatives. In 2022, we saw a volume increase of nearly 5% in our road transportation fuel category. Combined with higher margins in the US and Canada, our gross profit for fuel increased by 12.4%, sorry, during the year. This improvement has allowed us to absorb all of the increased costs caused by inflation. In the US, our fuel margin was just over $0.396 per gallon for the year, a very solid performance and the fifth consecutive year of improvement. In Canada, we also saw an improvement as our fuel margin was more than CAD 0.117 per liter, up almost CAD 0.014 per liter. We have continued to work vigorously and rigorously on initiatives to streamline and minimize our controllable expenses. While we experienced inflationary and labor cost pressures in the past year, we were able to maintain a 3.4% compound annual growth rate in normalized operating expenses over fiscal 2020, which was below the prevailing inflation rate for that period. We are seeing many benefits stemming from our cost optimization strategy. We remain committed to keeping long-term operating expense growth below the rate of inflation and have made significant progress in this regard, as demonstrated by our performance compared with fiscal 2020. Last year, once again, we saw the strength of our business model, including the strength of the cash flows generated. Our EBITDA increased by 3.6% over the previous year, climbing to nearly $5.25 billion. In the same period, we generated strong free cash flow of $2.2 billion. Over the years, we have seen strong growth in free cash flow with a compound annual growth rate of almost 19% between 2012 and 2022. Finally, we took advantage of our exceptional results and promising future to raise our quarterly dividend by more than 25% year-over-year. Notably, we have increased our dividend for 16 consecutive years since the first dividend payment on November 15th, 2005. This demonstrates our commitment to reviewing and rewarding our shareholders as our profits grow. In addition, we continued implementing our share purchase program and allocated more than $1.8 billion in fiscal 2022 for the repurchase of 46.8 million shares, enabling us to complete our program in full. At the beginning of fiscal 2023, we implemented a new share repurchase program that has allowed us to repurchase up to 10% of our public float. That will allow us to repurchase up to 10% of our public float or a total of over 79.7 million shares. Under this program, we have already repurchased more than CAD 475 million worth of shares. We returned almost CAD 2.2 billion to our shareholders last year, after having optimally invested in our growth initiatives and in the maintenance of our operations. As a result of our strong organic growth and despite payouts to our shareholders of nearly CAD 2.2 billion, we saw our leverage ratio remain fairly stable at 1.39, well below our target of 2.25. Our capital structure is solid, diversified, and responsible following the issuance of green bonds last year, a first for a retailer in the accommodation fuel sales industry. In addition, subsequent to the end of the fiscal year 2022, we introduced a commercial paper program in the US for up to $2.5 billion, once again re-strengthening our capital structure through increased access to capital markets. As for acquisitions, our balance sheet has put us in an excellent position with a total of more than $5 billion in total liquidities at the end of the fiscal year, a leverage ratio of 1.39, and the capacity to invest about $10 billion, and this should be an opportunity that is very attractive. Let's talk about capital allocations. Internally, we are disciplined in allocating capital. We allocate between 35%-40% of EBITDA to capital expenditures, with a mix of approximately 35% on network development with new stores and relocations. 30% on commercial programs like Fresh Food, Fast, the development of our car wash network and hot and cold drink distribution. Another 25% on same business capital, including IT, rebranding and renovations. Finally, 10% for businesses and emerging innovations. This 35%-40% reinvestment back into the business leaves approximately 45% to free cash flow after interest and taxes. We will continue to increase our dividend, and we'll be using free cash flow to pay down debt if the adjusted leverage ratio exceeds the 2.25 time target. We will use the remaining free cash flow for mergers and acquisitions and opportunistic share repurchases. Over the past year, free cash flow was at $2.2 billion, which enabled us to continue to meet our financial obligations on debt, but also to increase the dividend by approximately 25%, paying $0.4175 per share for the fiscal year, and to repurchase more than $1.8 billion of our shares. In fiscal 2022, we were able to maintain a strong return on capital employed, a particularly important metric for assessing our operational efficiency. As we demonstrate over time by integrating acquisitions and driving organic growth, we are able to get more out of our assets. We have demonstrated time and time again our ability to increase our returns following the integration of large acquisitions. A strong operating performance combined with efficient capital allocation strategies have now allowed or enabled us to achieve 15.4% return on capital employed this past year. Let's now present our most recent trends as reported in the first quarter results on August thirtieth, yesterday. Merchandise same store sales growth was 3.5% in the US and 2.8% in Europe and in other regions, while in Canada there was a slight decrease of 1.3% as observed, mainly due to the decrease in cigarette sales. In terms of fuel volumes, we experienced a decrease of 4.4% in the US and 2.7% in Europe and other regions, mainly caused by the notable price increases at the pump that jumped significantly since last year. Meanwhile, in Canada, we have observed a 0.4% increase. Over the quarter, our adjusted operating expenses increased by 7.3% compared to the same quarter last year, approximately 1% less than the inflation seen in the quarter, during the quarter across our network. As we have previously noted, we implemented measures in the prior year to control our expenses and the results of this quarter, and we can attest to our discipline in controlling costs in an environment where inflation is very present. This performance allowed us to generate gross profits of $2.9 billion, an increase of 10.9% and adjusted earnings per share of $0.85 for the first quarter, an increase of nearly 20% year-over-year. We now have, as we have discussed often with investors over the past four years, our strategic plan aiming to double our power opportunities, has been split between organic growth initiatives and acquisitions. We've got 60% organic growth and 40% in acquisitions. After four years, we achieved the $5.1 billion in organic growth objectives in EBITDA for fiscal 2022, excluding the contribution of acquisitions, which is slightly above $5.1 billion. We had total EBITDA growth over the past four years of close to $2.3 billion. All of this testifies to how our plan is rigorous and all of the plans have activated, and it highlights all of the excellence of our team's execution. Mergers and acquisitions should continue to play an important role in the coming years, and we remain well-positioned to take advantage of new opportunities with a particular focus on the U.S. and Asia. We are well-positioned to remain an industry leader and deliver strong organic growth through our geographic diversification, our exposure to the future mobility, our strong operating and marketing skills, the operating leverage we have created, and finally, our strong financial position. Finally, our strong and disciplined M&A skills fueled by our low-cost base and ability to create synergies, all this within a strong culture. These strengths will help us continue to outperform in delivering EBITDA growth and free cash flow conversion and maximizing our return on capital. Finally, our shareholders can rest assured that we will continue to adhere to our strict financial discipline in executing our strategy, whether in our investments to drive organic growth or in the evaluation of acquisitions opportunities. With that, I'll turn the discussion over to Mr. Alain Bouchard. Thank you, Claude. We will now proceed with the question period. Do we have any questions, Madam Secretary? No. No questions, Mr. Chairman. Questions? No questions. We will wait 30 seconds to see. No questions. Therefore, we will now close the meeting. Once again, we thank you for your presence, your participation in this meeting, and looking forward to seeing you again next year. Thank you.