We have Marcel Teunissen, our Chief Financial Officer, Ian White, our President, Parkland Canada, Pierre Magnan, President International, Donna Sanker, our President USA, Ferio Pugliese, our Senior Vice President, People and Culture and HSE, Darren Smart, there's Darren, our Senior Vice President, Energy Transition and Corporate Development, Uwe Stueckmann, our Senior Vice President, Strategic Marketing and Innovation. Of course, we also have Tariq Remtulla, who is our Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary. He's unfortunately not here with us today. But we do look forward to hearing from all aspects of the business and our leadership team who's here today. Now, many of you know Parkland, or maybe you think you do because you've been covering us for so long. But we are a really exciting company, and you know what we like to say? We like to say that we power what moves people. Here's a little video to show you exactly what we mean. Each and every day, millions of people rely on Parkland to fuel up, to plug in, to get around, to eat, to plan meals, for healthy choices on the go or a quick snack, to grab convenient items or to plan tonight's dinner. We are Parkland. We make, buy, and distribute fuel that meets the evolving energy needs of our customers. From filling up the family car to powering corporate fleets and industry, we energize communities and neighborhoods. With a vast retail network of food and convenience, we bring forward brands customers trust. We incentivize and reward loyalty, giving customers greater savings and convenient ways to make their dollar go further. We are a family of trusted brands that meet essential needs, and we are a dedicated team focused on our customers. We are Parkland. All right, to hear a little bit more, let's please welcome to the stage Parkland's President and CEO, Bob Espey. Good morning, and welcome. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to spend with the Parkland team to hear about our story, what we've achieved, and our plans for going forward. That was a great video, and I tell you, as leader of Parkland, I am so proud of our team. And that video featured our team winning in the field. And that team, led by the team that we introduced earlier, our SLT, has been able to consistently outperform and over-deliver. So in 2021, the last time we were together as a group, we set an ambitious target to grow the business to CAD 2 billion of EBITDA by investing CAD 4.8 billion in capital.. I was really pleased when earlier this year, we were able to announce we achieved that target a year early and with CAD 2 billion less in capital. That really is driven by the team, and if there's one thing I want you to take away is this team will deliver. We've consistently delivered. We've always set ambitious targets. We've done that for the last 12 years, and every time, we've either met or exceeded those targets. Again, I'm grateful for the team, their commitment to our customers, and ultimately supporting us in our Journie at Parkland. So going forward, the other thing is, you know, the team's been very focused on delivering, but they've also been building the platform for growth. One of the things I'll talk today is we've been investing a lot in the base business to carry us forward. Today, we press released another set of ambitious targets for Parkland, that's going to be delivered on a very, very good base. The foundation for growth, the platform for growth is in place, and we're really in a good spot to push the business forward, organically here as we grow. I have full confidence in our team, in our assets, in our brands to be able to deliver our targets going forward. I'm really looking forward to spending some time with you today and talking about our business. So Tara mentioned it, powering what moves people. Again, this is our purpose as a business. Fundamentally, you know, if you look on the left and the right, right? The retail business on the left, I want you to think cars and people. The commercial business on the right is basically trucks, planes, and ships, right? What are we here to do, is to service them, right? Why do we like cars and people? Because they consume. We have a great network that's well-positioned, and we'll talk about the investments we made in the underlying growth platform to really accelerate that growth going forward. On the right-hand side, we'll talk about our assets, about our team's dedication to giving great service to grow that business. As we get into the presentation, I'll explain why both of those channels are super important to Parkland and how we generate value. Now, one of the great things about the business is we are diversified, and diversified is a key strength for us. I'm gonna highlight some numbers here. That CAD 1.9 billion, which should actually be CAD 2 billion, right? So we've talked about 2024, CAD 2 billion. And you know, the great thing is when you look at this, we have this diversified revenues based by country, it's by segment. And it's interesting, you know, for those of you here where in 2021, we talked about reducing the impact of refining. Right? Well, fast forward to next year, we've hit our 20% target. So again, when you look at our cash flows, we have very ratable cash flows because we're in many markets, we're servicing many customers, and we do it with many products. So our two primary products, gasoline and diesel, and again, the importance of those are they give us good leverage on the supply side. And one of the things that we'll talk a lot about today is Parkland's supply advantage and why that's important to us. If there's one number I want you to remember on this slide, it's 28 billion. Right? 28 billion is a key lever for us, and it comes back to the scale and the breadth of the business and the ability of Parkland to generate value for its shareholders. How does that fit into our strategy? Again, you know, on the left, we want to win with the customer. On the right, we want to win with supply. Well, how do we do that? Winning with the customer is all about having an advantage with the customer, understanding what those customers wants, needs are, and building the programs, the assets to support those. Again, you know, as I said at the beginning, the team's delivered, but they've also been building the growth platform. So those are brands or our intangible assets, Parkland's own brands, our programs to support our marketing programs, to support our underlying growth, our service model to make sure that we give great service, and ultimately, our digital assets to make sure that we tie into our customers digitally so that they become loyal to us. And ultimately, what's our key KPI here for winning? It's growing market share. So we deliver, and our commitment is to deliver, is to gain market share and deliver above-industry organic growth. And we do that by making sure we have loyal customers. On the supply side, you know, it's interesting, that one number I asked you to remember, 28 billion, right? So if you can take 28 billion and find a penny, a penny a liter, it's worth CAD 280 million. We call that the Parkland Penny, 'cause that penny belongs to us. So one penny times 28 billion liters, CAD 280 million. And that's the key lever that we're pushing every day. And how do we do that? We've got the best logistics assets. So we've got truck, rail, ship, and then also storage. Right? So we basically move, store, buy... buy, store, move, and sell. And that value chain enables us to touch that barrel multiple times or that liter multiple times and make money on it. And that's where we get the lowest cost to serve in the market. So our price, in terms of what we pay for our primary products, gas and diesel, is lower than any other independent in the marketplace. That is our objective. And what that enables us to do is start to develop a flywheel, right? So build demand. So on the growth platform, build demand, push supply. Push supply with our logistics, our capabilities, and ultimately, our scale that we bring to that. One penny, CAD 280 million. Then ultimately, it's all about the team. Making sure the team's motivated and incented to deliver day in and day out. And again, our team delivers. The products that we sell, people use every day. You know, one of the questions that we get asked a lot about is, "Well, what is the impact of energy transition on your business?" And it's something that we monitor very closely. But, you know, again, if you go back to the fact that everybody in this room used the products that we sell today, if you think about it, gasoline, diesel, jet. I mean, who drove their car here? Got a couple. Yes, a couple more. Most people probably took public transit. But you probably, hopefully stopped at an Ultramar site on your way, logged on to your Journie app, gained some points. Maybe you're running a little late, you ran in and grabbed an egg sandwich. That's what we service, right? So we supply stuff that people buy every day. On the diesel, who took the train in? Right? Fortunately, we still run diesel trains in this country, so you contributed to the products that we sell. Now, we may have sold product to you or to that train through a wholesaler that we supply or directly through one of our commercial operations. And then finally, who flew in from Vancouver? Sven. Sven's one of our legal partners. He flew in from Vancouver, and so thank you for that, because a third of the fuel that was in that plane was produced and sold by Parkland, and you also had some SAF in that fuel to transport you there. So we touch many Canadians, many Americans, many people in the Caribbean, South and Central America, every day. We do millions of transactions, and they buy from us repeatedly. So we look at our various product portfolio, and we start to look out 10 years and say, "Where's demand going? Where are these products going?" Fundamentally, the outlook's pretty damn good, right? So if you start at the top on gasoline, what drives gasoline demand? Population growth. So people, remember, people in cars, right? That drives less energy efficiency in the fleet. There's a miles-driven piece, which tends to be consistent, and then ultimately substitutes, EVs, right? So when you look at that, right, what's the impact for Parkland? One of the things we talked about in 2021 was investing in demand-resilient markets. So these are markets where we're not seeing high EV penetration. So if you look at kind of the middle part of Canada, the middle part of the U.S., Florida, the Caribbean. I mean, not a lot of EVs coming through. The markets where we do see EVs, like in B.C., which is a leader in Canada, we're investing, and we're learning, and we're understanding, and we're quite excited about what we're seeing. So that is an emerging opportunity for Parkland. You know, on the gasoline side, what happens in markets where there is mature, if not declining demand, is the best players win, right? So this goes back to our strategy of investing in A and B retail sites, right? Having the strongest sites in the market, having a good offer, having a food offer. These are all things that we've been building over the last few years, so that when we start to see demand decline, which we haven't, it's not our sites that will fall out. The second thing is margins tend to expand. We've seen that not only in our industry, in certain markets in Europe, where we started to see gasoline come off, but ultimately, just in other markets, when you look at mature and declining market, that tends to happen. So, you know, again, we're well positioned there. We're positioned to win, and we'll continue to invest. You know, I do want to talk just about diesel and jet, right? So this goes back to that balanced portfolio, right? Gasoline, diesel. You know, that diesel is incredibly resilient, right? Diesel tends to run high power applications. Remember, trucks, ships, planes, right? They consume a lot of power, and it's very difficult. There are few substitutes for that right now. You can't do it with batteries; hydrogen's nascent. So what will people do? They'll come to us and say: "How can we lower our emissions?" Well, the good news is we can sell them renewable diesel. So when we look at that, and we look at diesel and the ability to sell renewable diesel, it's a growing market, and it'll grow over the next decade. Same with jet. So, and then finally, our actual renewables business. So as many of you have followed Parkland, you know we have a large rail fleet. It is a core competency of ours, and renewables move by rail. So it's a business that's growing very quickly for us as we match buyers and sellers in the market and are growing that business. So again, when you look at our product set, we're actually in a good spot, and we've got good demand, good fundamentals driving those products over the next decade. Back to the team. So again, if there's two things I want you to remember, 28 billion liters and then the team that delivers, right? So I do want to go back to the team, 'cause one of the things that we've done is we've acquired a lot of businesses. And over the last, you know, with 6,000 employees, 90% of those, we've welcomed through acquisitions into Parkland. And one of the questions I often get asked is: "Well, how do you develop a culture that actually works?" 'Cause you're bringing all these people together. We bring people from big oil companies, we bring people from independents, right? So we do spend a lot of time making sure that we all think and operate the same way. So core to that is our focus on safety. So we take businesses, and we make them safe. The other thing is in our values, so safety being the top one, the other thing is an environment of respect, right? We want people to treat each other as colleagues. Ultimately, what we want to do is motivate people to deliver good service to our customers, because if we can take care of our employees, they will take care of our customers and get that extra little bit out of the business. You know, the other thing underpinning us is what we call our bold behaviors. So the one thing that we've realized is when you bring businesses together, you still need to let the team in the field win. And one of the things that we focused on is making sure we allow the team in the field, the levers to make decisions and make sure that they can service their customers, we're not getting in their way, and ultimately, they can grow the business. And we developed a set of behaviors called Parkland's Bold Behaviors, and they're about leadership behaviors. And it's about building great teams, owning your mandate, leading through continuous improvement, and ultimately delivering the results. Our team is very focused on that. They're incented on it. It runs through their pay structure. Their training is focused on that, and it really is about developing a culture that is there to win and deliver. And again, we consistently see that. You know, we set over the last decade, we set four stretch targets. We've always meet or beat it, right? And again, it's that team and that culture that works day in and day out to deliver the results. So I'm very proud. I'm very proud of our team. I'm proud of their commitment to our customers, and ultimately, our support for them to win in the field is imperative. So let's go back to customer and what we call customer. So winning with the customer, what's the Parkland customer advantage? We are passionate about understanding who our customers are and where they're going and what we need to offer them. So I'll spend a few minutes talking about our retail business and our commercial business and how we think about culture and winning with the customer. So on the retail side, you know, it's interesting. You know, one of the core things in business is understand where your target market is, right? And I would say one of the things that our marketing team has done and Parkland has done well is find the two highest value customers in the convenience channel, right? So we talk about premium pit stoppers. These people want quality. They'll pay a little more. They want a well-lit, well-merchandised, good quality items. And then on-the-go refuelers, a bit more value-conscious, time-starved, multitasker, want to get in and out, but they want the same thing. So some of the customer preference there, again, convenience is critical. You need to be where they are. You know, as Ian loves to say, nobody gets up in the morning thinking about going to a convenience store. We're there to meet the unmet need, which is the beauty of the format, right? Because they're there, they need something, we can basically provide it and charge for it. Quality food, right? We've made a big investment in food, which we'll talk about. We now sell food in all of our sites, and it's a high growth category area for us, and our customers are demanding a better quality food offer than what, than what's currently offered by our competitors. Rewards matter, so investment in Journie and making sure that we can turn our customers into loyal customers. And then ultimately, it's got to be easy to get in and out. And again, our team has made incredible investments in our brands, our sites, and then, and our, our, our loyalty platform to make that a seamless operation. The other thing is to understand is where's the puck going? So where's the industry going? And again, what we see is the strength of the small format. You know, big box has come under tremendous pressure when you look at all the different channels that can supply, right? Again, this goes back to the unmet need. You know, people come to us because they need to. They've forgotten something. They're on the go, and they need some food. And that strength of that small format is incredible, and we've demonstrated that time and time again through various economic cycles, various shifts in consumer behavior: that the convenience format wins. Again, importance of value. So again, we'll talk a lot about our, our loyalty program and how we add value back to our customers. Personalized experience. So again, we're getting to a point now, and our marketing team, our head of marketing, Uwe, will talk about it: how we can actually go back to those two segments, the two most valuable segments in the market that we're targeting and winning with, and making sure that we can offer them what they look for and pull them into our sites. And then ultimately, where EV's going. We're making great progress on our network in B.C., and we'll talk a bit about that. So, you know, what does the, what does the retail customer want? They want an integrated experience, right? So many of our competitors have different forecourt brands that are unlinked from their backcourt. Our objective is to pull people into the forecourt and push them into the backcourt, right? We can do that, again, with the Journie program, connects that experience. If we can take a person from who comes to get energy, whether that's gasoline or our emerging EV offer, and push them into the backcourt, we do really well, because on average, they're spending CAD 15-CAD 20 once they get in the site. So that's a key lever for us. The other thing is, how do we bring these brands together? Our brands are very valuable, right? Our brands are proven in local markets. They also identify back to those two core customers, right? If you think of the premium pit stopper, they want a premium offer, you know, whether that's Chevron, Ultramar, these are perceived to be better quality, or the value shopper, right? Which wants a better value, where we have our independent brands, you know. And then ultimately, our convenience, our core convenience brands, tying that together and unifying is through the Journey program. So it's been an incredible investment. So again, on the energy side, we have this multi-brand strategy. And again, we get asked a lot about that. "Why don't you just change to one brand?" Well, again, we have industry-leading brands in key markets that have above average market share. So that's a key driver for us, and those brands have taken decades to build. The equity in those brands is incredible, and to replicate that with one brand is incredibly expensive. The second thing is we can hit multiple customer segments, right? The premium pit stopper and the on-the-go refueler, right? So you think premium brands, independent brands, like Pioneer in the local market here. The other thing is we have a very dense network. So we have the most number of sites in Canada. I think on the convenience side, we're at number 2 right now. But again, scale and density is key, and people want to make sure that they can have the same experience, whether they're in their local market or traveling. And then ultimately, leading market share. Again, above average industry volume per site. So those are key drivers that we focus on. You know, back to that gasoline, if and when it starts to come off, we're in a really good position because we've got the best assets and the best brands in the marketplace. So our other new emerging is EV charging. I think there was an article in The Globe today about EV charging, and, you know, it's interesting. You know, we are seeing... So we were fortunate, we're in B.C. There's EV adoption in Canada is the highest in B.C., and what we did is a little different from others. Again, I give our team credit because what did they do? They first asked customers who have EVs, "Well, what do you want?" Right? And what they said is, "We want three things. You know, we're worried about charging, charging the vehicle when we leave the city." So range anxiety. We're also-- We don't want to wait there for hours." So they want speed, so ultra-fast charging. And then the third thing is, "While I'm waiting, I kind of want something to do. I need amenities." Right? So we took that, and in B.C., we've created the highest density ultra-fast charging network in Canada. And what that's enabled us to do is start to look at the network effect, right? How do people interact with the site? How, what are their behaviors when they come to the site? Do they go into the store? Do they spend money? And, and the investment thesis is paying out. What we're seeing is, first and foremost, is that people will come. They do appreciate the network. They're hooked into our loyalty program, so you enter the EV charging ecosystem through loyalty. You know, and again, it's early days. I mean, we're barely into the market. Darren will give an update when we talk about our strategy in action. And I tell you, it's very encouraging what we're seeing in terms of not only utilization, but the backcourt conversion rate. It's actually higher than what we see in the gasoline vehicle. So, so again, early days, but good, good signals. And I would say the most important thing as an organization, we're learning. We're learning about how the market is changing, and ultimately, you know, this goes back to the customer advantage, understanding what the customer needs are and making sure we're moving towards those on an ongoing basis. On the Run. So for those of you here in 2021, we had few On the Run sites. Over the last four years, we've been building a proper national network in Canada. We've also added sites in the U.S. and in our international business. But what we're seeing in those sites is quite encouraging, right? So what we see is the On the Run brand has good brand equity, with both the premium pit stopper and the on-the-go refueler. It's interesting, what we're seeing in the core categories, 10% same-store sales, right? Far above industry. You know, the other thing is on the core, and again, on our core high-margin categories, two times the growth rate versus industry, right? So we've been able to create a brand that appeals to the highest value segments in the market. Food. We'll talk a bit more about food, but we're in our locations with food and with frozen food. Through the M&M brands, we're seeing 60% growth in that channel. And then finally, we've been able to improve our C-store margins by 3% in the period that we've been talking about. So that's pretty phenomenal, right? But we're kind of in the last inning of implementing. So if I look forward, we have this incredible asset now that we can build on. So when we talk about growing the business organically, we have a great brand. It's proven, and we know how to operate it, and we'll see that start to push the underlying organic growth in the business. And then food. Again, as I said, we're in all of our sites with food. You know, it's interesting, if you look on the right there, 70% of consumers are dissatisfied with low-quality C-store food. I mean, you know, I can ask everybody in this room, would they go to a C-store to eat? And not many hands would come up, but so there's a big opportunity there. Again, going back to our two customers, they expect quality, right? What we're doing is focusing on quality across all three day parts. You know, whether that's just serving frozen food in a smaller site or in a larger site where we have traffic, a fresh offer, or our newly created and rolled out bites by M&M. And again, 80% of consumers recognize M&M and are eager to try it in a fresh format. So we're going to leverage that brand, as we've done in the past. You think On the Run, taking a brand and pushing it into the market. With M&Ms, we're doing the same thing. So bringing that together, we have a really comprehensive food offer, and again, we're in the early innings here. We've implemented. You'll start to see this drive same-store here as we go forward. And then finally, the Journie program, you know, and again, you know, just a few things. First, I'm super proud of the team and what they've been able to choose. So 5 million members. That is a top ten loyalty program in Canada out of the gate, created from nothing. You know, we launched in 2020, and again, to get that sort of momentum is incredible. So we've created a very valuable asset, and one of the things is people are actually coming to us and saying, "We'd like to be part of your Journie program." And we partnered with CIBC earlier on. We now have a partnership with Aeroplan, and what that does is extends the reach, right? It gives us access to their customers that we can now link into our program. They can see the benefits, and we'll see the number of participants continuing to grow. The other thing is making sure it's integrated into our business. So we have M&M there. You know, one of the key thesis when we bought M&M, they came with a 2 million member loyalty program, is porting that onto the system. So again, the more people we get on Journey, the more loyalty we get, and you can see the performance at the bottom of the slide. You know, I'll point out that basically, on average, an engaged, loyal, Journie member spends an extra CAD 500 a year with us, and that's incredible. What we're seeing is, and what we saw in the last couple of quarters, is that's starting to drive organic growth in our business. So this investment that we've been doing for the last four years will now start to drive. So again, that's a key theme, right? So we've delivered, but we've also invested in the growth platform across all of our segments. And again, you know, the results speak for themselves. Our, again, above-industry same-store, and then also our convenience and food businesses are growing at a far greater rate than our fuel business or convenience and food business. So again, which is one of the objectives we set out to do in 2021, is to be able to do that. Again, it took some investment. You know, we had to get the sites, we had to get the programs in place, we had to get the branding in place. It's all now coming together, and it's gonna really start to drive performance. So I'm really proud of what the team's done in the retail business. We have a good runway of growth in front of us, and, you know, in terms of a key driver of organic growth in our business is the retail platform. Talk about commercial now. So again, gasoline, retail, commercial, diesel. And why is that important? Because we can buy both and we can leverage both. So how does our commercial business work? So first of all, you know, when we go back to keeping our customers moving and I talked about trucks, planes, and ships, right? So all high power applications, they need diesel. And what they do is they need diesel where they operate their equipment. Our service model, our business model, is designed about being where they need us, and we do that through having great assets placed on the ground. The other thing is the diversification of that customer base. And we serve hundreds of thousands of customers in different verticals every day, and it's a very resilient business. So, we like the business, we're continuing to invest in the business. So when you look at how do we make money in that business, again, the first thing is safe and reliable delivery. So people want us to come to them and supply them energy. So we do that through trucks that go out, we do it through our Cardlock network, and we do it through a team that's super motivated to make sure that they keep our customers running. These customers do not want downtime in their assets. They value reliability over price. The second thing is proprietary infrastructure. And again, you know, here's a picture of a barge. It's in the Vancouver Harbour. It is the only barge. It is the only place where you can buy marine diesel in Vancouver unless you go to a terminal. And nobody's gonna roll in and park a barge beside you, right? So we have lots of assets that are proprietary, right? They're unique, they've got large barriers to entry into the markets, and that gives us a competitive advantage. Now, another great example of that is putting a tank on a customer site. So our big commercial customers, you know, great example from our international business, which Pierre will talk to, is, you know, we have some big mining customers. Well, we have, in some cases, more tanks on those properties than we do on our own. And we're supplying them with. We're managing their fuel for them in that. Well, that's a great integration, right? There are tanks. It's not like they can go to a competitor, right? We're very linked and integrated with that customer. So we like that sticky customer relationship that is backed by the assets. And then finally, meet evolving energy needs. Look, there's a piece of equipment that is very difficult to find a substitute for, right? You're not gonna do any- you're not gonna electrify that. Hydrogen's very nascent and unproven. And ultimately, what are people coming to us for is, "I need to do, reduce my GHG emissions. How do I do that?" Well, we can sell you renewable diesel. We can sell you biodiesel. We can sell you carbon offset credits. So we can help you kinda customize your emissions, right? And that's starting to resonate and gain traction in the market. Again, moving where the market's going and being able to service those very valuable customers to Parkland. So again, reliable delivery, proprietary infrastructure. Here's another great picture. You know, a unique asset in core markets that are difficult to replicate. So I talked about that barge. Here's an airport refueler, I believe, in Barbados, where, you know, we're fueling a transatlantic flight, and we're one of two suppliers in that market. These are the type of assets that make us ratable from a cash flow perspective. They've got high barriers to entry, and they protect this business. So, you know, and again, so it's that focus on having the right assets, the right delivery assets, and the right team in local markets. It's hyperlocal and making sure that we know, we know our customers, we know what their needs are, and ultimately, that they never run out of fuel. That keeps us building these long-standing relationships that continue to deliver value and sales to us. So, you know, I talked a bit about this. Again, we can supply people with their low carbon needs in this channel. We can supply them with renewables, we can supply them with carbon offsets. So we do have—we were early into the market, in both the voluntary and the regulated market, in carbon offsets. And we can go to a customer and say, "How are you going to reduce? Do you need to reduce? I'm under pressure. I have a corporate mandate that's telling me I need to bring my GHG emissions down by 20%. I'm running a ferry. I'm running a big excavator. I don't have an alternative." Come to us. We're a one-stop shop that helps people reduce their emissions. And again, we've got the platform. We've been building this. We've got the rail cars to bring the RD into the market, to move it between various plants. So we're well-positioned from our logistics perspective and also our capability around offsets. Again, these are capabilities that we've been building over the last four or five years that will really push and start to grow, push our organic growth here going forward. So again, are we winning in commercial? This is a great chart. Volume is up, right? So ultimately, what's the biggest indicator of success? Is volume and margin in this business, right? Am I growing the business, and are my margins increasing? And we have a track record of doing that by making sure we focus on customers that value what we bring: proprietary assets, reliable, safe and reliable delivery, and a team that's motivated to serve. So again, a great example of winning and a great example of a platform that's in place to push our growth going forward. So back to supply. And again, remember the 28 billion liters and the 1 penny a liter. And again, you know, this is the secret sauce in terms of how we generate value for our, our shareholders. Again, that Parkland Penny is incredibly valuable, and it's our penny. It belongs to Parkland; it belongs to our shareholders. So here's a great example of a proprietary asset. We purchased a business in Eastern Canada. It's an import market. It gave us access to import volume, which gave us leverage, right? So we can either import or buy from local refineries. Incredible payback on that type of asset. When you look at our system, and it's interesting, our objective, as I stated, was lowest cost to serve. How do we reduce the cost? You know, we, we like to say, and what we say internally is, we buy better than any other independent in the marketplace, right? 'Cause that's who we're competing with, and that lowest cost to serve translates into winning on the customer side. But again, you know, the other thing is, we like hard-to-supply markets, and we also like the fact that we think in liters, right? I talked about 28 billion liters, 1 penny a liter. Most integrated organizations or traders, they think in barrels, much bigger. They think they operate in liquid markets. We look for illiquid markets, where we can add value through our distribution assets. So again, truck, rail, ship, and basically marry the needs of our customers in these illiquid markets with supply and generate more value, right? And so when you look at the map, you know, we often get, "Why are you in these four markets," right? Well, they all have very similar characteristics. They're difficult to service. So if you look at, again, Eastern Canada, import market, there aren't a lot of options to buy fuel in Eastern Canada, right? It's interesting, if you go to buy fuel in Montreal, you have, like, four or five options. Parkland's one of them. If you go down to New York or Chicago, these big liquid markets, you have 50-100 options to buy fuel. We like the latter, the, the first market, right? Low liquidity, ability to generate value through our, our assets, and by controlling the import, it allows, it gives us great leverage in that market to continue to push our buy price down, and again, buy better than any other independent. Western Canada is a bit different. Right, again, very inefficient from a distribution perspective. There aren't really pipelines to take refined product out of the market. The refining complex there is long, so we have a rail fleet, and we move product down into the U.S. Well, why did you buy the U.S. business? We have a place to put that volume, and it's worked exceptionally well. So again, that mid-continent, U.S. Rockies market, again, is inefficient. The infrastructure is not in the right place. It's hard for customers to get product. And what we've been able to do, Donna will talk about it, she runs our U.S. business, is buy and develop a set of strategically placed terminals where we can either buy locally or we can move product in externally. Again, generating that extra advantage. And then finally, the Caribbean. Again, very similar, except it all happens on water. What the team there has is we have the largest fleet of clean product in the region, and we are the midstream in the region. That, coupled with strategic storage in various markets, gives us an advantage over any other competitor in the marketplace. You've seen the amazing results the team's been able to do with that in terms of growing, not only growing our volume, but growing the supply benefit. I talk about one penny. There's multiple pennies here, and there's multiple pennies still to come. A key lever in generating our synergies and organic growth going forward is pulling hard on supply. We've got the assets, we've been building capabilities, we've got the systems and processes. We're in a really good place. The best thing we can do and the best returns we can get are to invest in these markets 'cause we've got the brands, we've got the, we've got the customer value proposition, we're there in the market, and we have the supply. So any capital that we put in, particularly from an organic perspective, invested in these or adjacent markets, just leverages that platform, and it's incredibly accretive to the business. So that's one of the key things, as we grow, we talk about our growth, organic, it's in these markets. So again, how do we bring it all together? Multiple supply sources. So scale allows us to buy from refiners, importers, do our own import, leverage our assets. Again, I talked about truck, rail, ship, and then ultimately storage and pipelines in certain markets. So that allows us the strategically located infrastructure to make sure that we can capture, capture the value of product coming in and out of markets, and again, the flexibility in our distribution system. And again, I talked about thinking in liters, right? So the flexibility and the secret at Parkland is to be able to do lots of things in small quantities on the supply side. And there are. I don't know of another competitor that can do that as well. It's something that we've invested in. We call ourselves a small barrel trader versus a big barrel trader, and it's all about optimizing that system at the liter level. You know, that's at the site level, at the distribution level, it's at the contract level, and we have all sorts of systems and automation that underlie that, that help the team to be responsive on a day-to-day basis. Again, with the target of creating Parkland Pennies. So again, bringing it together, you know, again, talked about 28 billion liters. There it is, and you can see the remarkable growth that we've had over the last decade, and a key lever in what we do and how we generate value. But the synergies that we've been able to get, which Marcel will take you through, both the growth, driving the growth in the business... And again, great picture here. This is a U.S. terminal in... In Idaho, you can see a beautiful picture here of rail coming in, probably from Canada, probably from, with Parkland cars and servicing that local market, which, which is short, right? So it's again, it's taking that scale that we have, 28 billion liters, giving optionality. So optionality is choice, to basically choose, move, buy from the best value in the marketplace, and ultimately continuing to deliver on that lowest cost to serve. Talk a bit about Burnaby, and I know there have been some questions about Burnaby and does it fit within our portfolio? And it's interesting, you know, it's, one of the things that we've learned about Burnaby is the Parkland skill set has been incredibly valuable to optimizing that asset. So generally, when people think about refineries, it's about scale, it's about, having multiple refineries, technical capability. You know, we're good at that, but what we're really great at is optimizing the asset through our assets, right? So the first thing we did is when we bought the business, it exported somewhere between 15%-20% of the product. So we brought all that product back into the local market around the smokestack, right? So one of the biggest benefits has been is to move that product into the local market where we're not taking an export discount. So that's been a great enabler. The other thing is we do run the business with high utilization. We have a track record of good performance. We demonstrated that last quarter with record throughput. The other thing is optimizing the product mix, right? So how are we pulling the levers between gas, diesel, and jet, right? How do we make sure that we supply the fuel that Sven came in on at YVR, is by making sure we have enough jet to go into that pipeline, which is plumbed right into the airport. And again, we're always optimizing and in Parkland's hands, again, because we have the ability to market locally, that we've been able to optimize that asset incredibly well and incredibly profitably. And then the, the, the final thing is growing the co-processing. So we've talked about there is a mandate in the British Columbia market to reduce GHG emissions. Well, we're well ahead of that mandate. What our team has done, we are a leader, a leader in North America in taking bio-components, putting it into the refinery. So it's basically canola oil, tallow, and something called tall oil, which is a byproduct from the forest industry. In exchange, we get carbon credits, right? Which we can then monetize, and ultimately, this is a net benefit to us. We're able to avoid importing expensive renewable diesel into the market, and we meet our compliance through our own manufacturing. We scaled that incredibly, and we have another turnaround in 2026. We'll be at 10% of our throughput, and we can meet our compliance obligations well into the end of the decade. So again, by pulling those levers, we've been able to create incredible value in this asset. This asset has far outperformed our expectation, and taking the asset away would create an incredible dyssynergy for Parkland. And we can see how last quarter, how we've benefited from Burnaby. Again, we tend to see the benefit to the upside, and we saw that in spades, which again helps drive cash flow. So you know, I'm gonna hand it over to Marcel here. Again, I talked about one number, actually two, 28 billion liters, one penny a liter. He's gonna talk about many more numbers and talk about our targets going forward. I do want to just reiterate again, the Parkland team delivers. We continue to set aggressive targets. Marcel will talk about what those are for the next five years, and I'm confident that the team will deliver against those. Over to you, sir. Excellent. It's always good to see yourself on the screen here. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Bob, for setting the stage. As Bob said, I will be talking about numbers. That's going to go relatively quickly, but I know people are interested in the numbers, so we'll do that. We'll do that in two parts. First, we look back and really talk about our proven track record, and then we look forward, and what to expect from from Parkland. Bob already mentioned this, and so for those that were here in 2021, on the left side, you see what we actually said in 2021. We were just below CAD 1 billion of EBITDA in 2020, and we said we wanted to double that to CAD 2 billion by 2025. To get there, we said we would invest $4.8 billion from 2021 onwards, you know, and we would keep our leverage below 3.5. What we say now about next year, and sometimes I need to remind Bob that we're not living in 2024 yet, but what we will deliver by next year, and we're very confident about it, is $2 billion, a year early. And we do so with $2 billion less of investments to get there. So that's great in terms of that delivery. And that's really the strategies that we have developed, you know, with the competitive advantages, both on the customer side as well as on the supply advantages that Bob talked about, and the team that has made this actually happen for us. So it's really a great achievement, and we'll do so with leverage under three turns, which we've already achieved in quarter three. A bit more of a waterfall here and how we got from where we were in 2021 at CAD 1.26 billion of EBITDA, and how that leads to CAD 2 billion by 2024. You know, a big part, you know, in the last since that time, since we and since 2021, we did eight acquisitions. We did a few more if you go back to 2020. We did eight acquisitions, including our acquisition in Florida, you know, our acquisition in Eastern Canada, the terminals that Bob talked about. We bought the Husky network for those here in Canada as part of that. We did eight acquisitions, and we bought about $275 million of EBITDA, and we paid just over $2.1 billion for that. You know, and that's on a pre-synergy basis, about a 7.8x multiple. Yeah, and that demonstrates that we are acquiring in a disciplined way. We don't overpay for assets, and that's important. The synergy, you know, our synergies typically come from supply. That's about half of what we do. When we add a business that we buy, when we add that to that platform, there's an immediate accretion that comes from that supply advantage that we have, and that usually, with most of our acquisitions, accounts for about half of the of the benefits. And then the other half comes around operational performance improvement as well as cost takeout. Like, when we buy some of these businesses, there's, you know, we, we, we can learn from other parts of our business, improve that, and of course, with the platform, we can also take costs out. What we've seen in our acquisition, it's a bit different from what we buy, but anywhere between 30% and 50% of synergies, and actually, on average, we have done 40% on these eight acquisitions that we have done. And so if you take that into account on a, on a post-synergy multiple basis, our acquisitions are around 5.8x. I will agree that's pretty, pretty high up there relative to, to peers that do acquisitions. Cost savings, we talked about it earlier in the year. You know, one of the things that has happened in Parkland is that because we've added quite a bit of scale, we can now really start leveraging the scale that the organizations, the organization has. And so these cost saving, about two-thirds of that were people, and those people we have already left the organization, or we decided not to fill roles, or we've decided to not replace contractors in that, and it's about a third of that is on third-party savings. So just using the scale to buy other things than fuel. You know, we buy pumps, we buy underground tanks, we buy many things, you know, as a company, and we believe there is actually more opportunity there. But like for, you know, for this year, and next year, we'll deliver a total of CAD 75 million, and there's a bit more to come there. And the last piece, which is quite important, as we have grown our business and added it up, there is more organic growth opportunity within that business as well. So we spend roughly CAD 700 million or so on organic growth, but a lot of this organic growth didn't need much capital investment. Yeah, just using the the assets that we have had and continue to optimize that, better service to our customers, leveraging that supply advantage of the businesses we have, have done as well, and we've really found that the organic growth opportunity is really an important driver for our overall profitability. We have a lot of confidence in 2024. We often get asked, "So what could go wrong?" Well, actually, we've done all the acquisitions that are going to drive this. We've already paid for that, you know, and so we're already there. We've made all the decisions on, you know, people and organization, so that's already implemented. That's going in. We have assumed that the crack spreads or the refinery margins, that they return to normal. At the moment, they're above normal, so we like that. So that's upside when that happens. There's always a little bit of downside, but we don't see that quite. That's not quite symmetrical. There's less downside than there is actually upside. But we feel pretty good about 2024, and again, because we have the team to deliver, to deliver, and, you know, we already made all the decisions and investments we need to get there. If you zoom out a little bit more, you know, from 2020, we have been busier than just the eight acquisitions I talked about. We did about 20 acquisitions and spent about CAD 3 billion on acquisitions over the, over that period. And of course, in that period, our leverage went up, you know, to kind of the 3.4 by 2022, about 3.4 turns of leverage. That was within our stated kind of, you know, leverage boundaries. We've always said 2-3 turns normally, up to 3.5 for acquisitions, so we stayed within that. Because we bought so many businesses, we've been very busy integrating. That's kind of interesting. When I talk to investors, at times, they think integration is the flip of a switch. It isn't. There's a lot of hard work, kind of bringing things on systems, making sure people can operate safely, making sure that our offers get executed, you know, consistently, making sure that we leverage that supply advantage. So we've been very busy, you know, over the last period, to integrate all these acquisitions. And our leverage has also kind of reduced in that period. It's almost half a turn down in less than a year. And that's what we would typically expect, about just over half a turn of leverage reduction, when we don't do M&A. This is a cash flow-generating business, and as Bob already talked about, it's very resilient. We have lots of customers. People need our products, and through the cycle, you know, we expect to generate strong cash flow. Maybe also important, we were very busy in 2021 refinancing. So, you know, we refinanced a lot more expensive debt, and we pushed it out quite a bit. So we don't have any financing requirements over the next few years. About 80% of our debt, and it's a little bit more now, but about 80% of our debt is in a number of bonds, so it's fixed, fixed rate, and we pay about 4.8% on average, you know, on the bond stack, and so we don't have to refinance anything. Any debt reduction that we do is actually on our credit facility, which is on a floating rate basis. So we're in a good shape from a balance sheet perspective and from a financing perspective. Also, for you, shareholders, right? You know, we have an incredible track record, you know, of increasing dividend year-over-year. 11 years in a row, you know, we have increased our annual dividend to shareholders, and we pay about CAD 250 million of dividend a year, to our shareholders. And if you compare that to our peers in Canada or in the U.S., you know, that's a very respectable dividend. And you also see that our payout ratio in many cases is higher than our peers as well, and so we do reward shareholders for staying with us. Yep. So if you look back in the last couple of years, that's what you've really seen, you've seen that we have grown the business, right? EBITDA is up. You've seen that we increased shareholder returns, and we've actually reduced our leverage at the same time. So we can do those three things, which are critical just from a financial markets perspective, that we can do all three things at the same time. Let's start looking ahead on what's ahead of us. Maybe first complete the picture for 2024. So in September, we already said that we were, you know, going to deliver CAD 2 billion, or, you know, our target for next year is to deliver CAD 2 billion of EBITDA. So we give you a small range around that now. Then I want to just talk briefly about the Available Cash Flow per Share as a new metric. So the Available Cash Flow per Share is really our, you know, our cash flow from operations, excluding working capital, and then we minus our maintenance capital, we minus our interest, and we minus our leases. So what is left there is really the discretionary capital that's available for allocation into growth, into dividends, into buybacks, and what else we have. So that is kind of the Available Cash Flow per Share, and that's a metric that we'll continue to report on going forward as well. Capital for next year is kind of typical, what you've seen from us, around CAD 500 million or so, and that's both growth and maintenance capital. And we expect that to be in a non-maintenance, in a non-turnaround year, that that's kind of the run rate capital that you can expect from us. We continue to look for organic opportunities to grow the business as well, you know, but this is where we start in 2024. And important, our return on invested capital, we expect that to continue to increase to over 11% by 2024. Two things that we also continue with, we have announced CAD 500 million of divestments by 2025. These programs are in place, and we continue to work through these in 2024, and by the end of 2025, we will have done CAD 500 million of divestments, and we redeploy that capital to higher return opportunities within our business, and we continue to do that and high-grade our portfolio. Then finally, we'll continue to reduce leverage as well, you know, to the low end of the 2-3 range by the end of 2025, and we'll continue to work that in 2024 as well. So targets, looking out a bit further, 2028. What's our ambition for 2028? So we start on the left, available cash flow per share, the metric we talk about, we will double that from CAD 4.25, you know, over the last 12 months, to CAD 8.50 per share by 2028. So doubling the cash flow per share that's available, you know, for us as discretionary cash that's available. Our EBITDA, CAD 1.9 billion, that's our trailing 12 months EBITDA. You know, organically, we are targeting that to be at CAD 2.5 billion. We see the potential for M&A, and that could get us probably up to CAD 3 billion as a, you know, as an ambition or as a target for 2028. But I want to be clear that we only do M&A when it's accretive to shareholders. So CAD 2.5 billion organic, up to CAD 3 billion, you know, through M&A. Broadly, how do we get from the CAD 1.9 billion or the CAD 2 billion? Maybe we start from the CAD 2 billion that we are next year. How do we get there? There's more cost savings as we kind of integrate the platforms that we see, so that's a portion of that, around CAD 75 million. Organic growth, we talk quite a bit around it, and Bob talked already about the torque on the 28 billion liters that we have. You know, as we do this, some of the investments that we continue to make, so that counts for about CAD 350 million. And there's still more synergies, particularly in the U.S. business, which we talked about in Q3 with our results. There's more on synergies. That makes up the other, the remaining bit to get from CAD 2 billion-CAD 2.5 billion. And as I already said, M&A will be on top of that, you know, if we choose to do so. CAD 8.50 per share is not dependent on whether we do M&A, and that's for the finance wizards out here, and we'll talk a bit about it. Whether we grow our top line or whether we buy back shares within this period, we can deliver that $8.50 per share, respective of whether we actually, you know, kind of grow to $3 billion or $2.5 billion. Capital allocation, it's my favorite slide. It has most colors on it as well, on all the slides that you've seen today, but maybe really in three different parts. With our strategy and, you know, with the assets that we have and with the team that we have, we expect to generate about $6 billion of available cash flow in the period from 2024 to 2028. 25% or about $1.5 billion of that we allocate to dividends and to committed buybacks in that period. Yeah, and we continue to expect modest dividend increases in the period. As I said, you know, our dividend is already relatively high to some of our peers, so we're proud of that dividend, but we also see room, you know, for this to be supplemented with some buybacks. Second, 25% is organic growth, so about CAD 1.5 billion of organic growth in that period as well, where we target a minimum of 15% rate of return on those investments. And we have a good opportunity set, and we scrutinize it, and we prioritize it and make sure that we only allocate capital to the best-returning projects. But as we said, and you heard this from Bob as well, we have a big portfolio, and there's lots of opportunities there. And so we continue to look for those organic opportunities to build on the platform that we already have in the markets that we already there, that we already have and we operate in, just to extend the advantage that we have. And then look on the right side of that. Our view is that the current interest rates, the higher interest rates that we currently see, that they actually extend for a longer period of time. And for that, we continue to prioritize bringing, you know, bringing our debt down and bringing leverage down to create a more conservative, but also more flexible balance sheet. And so that's why we prioritize with that, that half, on the right side here, we prioritize to get to the low end of the 2-3 turns of leverage by the end of 2025. But there's a lot of that available as well to kind of, you know, then allocate to further growth or to additional share buybacks within overall capital allocation. And in the end, what we choose to do with that excess capital, whether it's buybacks or M&A, depends on what's the best return for our shareholders. Good. With that, Bob, I hand it back to you. I'm just gonna summarize here, and again, you know, why Parkland, right? So, what you've heard this morning is, again, we have a team that delivers. We've invested in our underlying assets, programs, and brands. We're well-positioned for future growth, and we have a disciplined capital strategy. You know, when you think about our markets, we're in a lot of markets that are growing, and for the one that's coming off, I think we have a very good strategy on how to maintain and gain market share in that. Energy transition for Parkland is a massive opportunity. We're leaning in. We're generating EBITDA, and it's organic, and it's great to see what the team's been able to achieve there. And again, when we look at our capital and where best to deploy it, it's in the markets, those four areas that we've outlined. Any capital we put on there, the return is tremendous because we've got the platform in place, whether that's on the customer side or on the supply side. The more volume we add, the more that flywheel spins, and the lower our cost to serve goes. Our competitive advantages: again, we have invested in a leading convenience and food offer, right? Buying M&M was incredibly strategic. It really complements our convenience offer and will allow us to come to market with a high quality, sought after, fresh food offer. We have the unique supply advantage. Again, the Parkland Penny. Every day, our team goes out and tries to find more pennies. And then the diversified growth platform. Again, many markets, many geographies, many products, right? So the result is stable cash flows. So let's, again, to summarize, Marcel's presentation: so why invest? We can grow the business. We can enhance shareholder returns. So we've got a good track record of giving back. We're gonna give back some more, and then ultimately, we can do that at the same time we have a great track record of deleveraging, and we can reduce leverage while we continue to grow. So basically, we're at that sweet spot where the CAD 6 billion that we'll generate will start to really fund and drive our growth without driving up our leverage and allowing us to pay back to our shareholders. So that's why it... You know, again, we appreciate your investment in Parkland. We appreciate your faith in the team, and again, it is a team that delivers, and we really have a good, good, good platform that we've built here, which will be robust going forward. So that being said, we'll turn it over to you guys. Please have a break, and then we'll call the team up, and we'll talk about our strategy in action. I'll turn it over to Tariq. Sorry, I think I- Bob, but there we go. Okay. We're gonna take about 10, 15 minutes, everybody, so you can grab a coffee. Thank you so much, Bob. Thank you so much, Marcel. When we come back, we'll have our leadership team up here, and we'll get that strategy in action session going. So just take a couple quick minutes for you. Great. Thank you, thanks. All right, we have everybody here. If you can hear me, and you're still out in the lobby, please come back in. Bring me a coffee, Dirk. Thank you. All right, we're gonna get back into our session here. This is our Strategy and Action session. We have our senior leadership executive right here with us. So I'm just gonna get right into it. Time is of the essence. So, Uwe, you are in the hot seat right off the top. Woo! Woo! There we go. In his opening remarks, you know, Bob spent a lot of time talking about our focus on customers. From your perspective, what role does Journie Rewards play in creating a customer advantage in our retail business? Awesome. Well, thanks, Tara. Morning, everybody. So yeah, you heard Bob talk about our customer advantage, and I just wanted to put a little bit of meat on that, add some color to that, with regard to the role the Journie Rewards program plays in creating a differentiated customer experience. We launched Journie just over three years ago, and you saw we've got millions of Canadians engaged on our reward platform. And we are, as a result of that, generating what I believe to be the single most complete and robust data platform in Canada, in fuel and convenience. And you know, that gives us a lot of opportunities. For instance, we have the opportunity to really now run pinpointed, laser-targeted promotions that stimulate demand in specific geographies or with specific customers. And we can do that because we have a digital engagement platform that Journie is built on. We, with no variable cost, can now reach our customers through email, through SMS, and through our app. And I just wanted to do a little plug on the Journie app. The Journie app is the single highest-rated loyalty app in the App Store in Canada. It's rated higher than Petro-Points, higher than Air Miles, higher than PC Optimum, higher than Scene+. We have an App Store rating of 4.8, which is absolutely world-class, and we're very proud of that. So if you haven't yet, you know, this is your opportunity to go download the Journie app. We've also built this on a digital platform that allows us to scale Journie into jurisdictions beyond Canada. It's built here in Canada, but it's built so that we can extend the platform to other jurisdictions. And good evidence of that is the recent launch of Journie in Puerto Rico, and it's early days. We're just starting to roll the program out there, but we're being met with a great positive response from both customers in Puerto Rico and our operators down there. Journie generates proven incrementality. Bob talked about it earlier. We've... We're seeing people shop more often and buy more when they come to the tune of about CAD 500 a year in incrementality that we get from an active Journie customer. We have about 25% of our volume on the program, which means there's a long runway for Journie to continue to grow, as we sign up about 10,000 new members every single week. So the program continues to really build momentum across our network. When we launched the program, we launched it with CIBC as our marquee inaugural partner for the program, and since then, over a half a million CIBC customers have joined their payment card to Journie Rewards to experience even more savings. So half a million people linking our—linking to our Journie app with their CIBC card, for incremental fuel savings. You know, great timing for us because tomorrow we are launching our second marquee partner in the Journie Rewards program, and that is Aeroplan. So starting tomorrow, we'll invite millions of Air Canada customers to experience our network, to earn Aeroplan points on fuel and on convenience exclusively in our network, to redeem for instant fuel savings and for gift cards exclusively in our network. Air Canada tells us that the number one category their customers have asked for to earn Aeroplan points is fuel, and starting tomorrow, we'll give that to them, and we'll give it to them with what I would call elegance and ease. It's a beautiful implementation starting tomorrow. And it'll not only give us new customers to our network, driving incremental volume, but it'll extend our data footprint. We'll allow customers to link their Aeroplan or their Air Canada app with the Journie app, extending our data footprint and getting even greater data asset across Canada. Giving our customers more choice, giving Aeroplan customers more value, and really investing in this, in this growth of Journie as a key differentiator to create a sticky customer value proposition in our retail network. So I'm really excited about that. Please download the Journie app, and Tara, back to you. All right. Thank you so much, Uwe. Let's move on to Ian, who's our President for Canada. And, you know, you recently bought a portion of Husky's retail network. You rebranded many of the forecourts to Chevron and Pioneer, and the c-store, of course, to On the Run. So what impact did you see bringing forward Parkland's brands? Great, Tara, thank you. Good morning, everybody. And I was listening to Bob and Marcel this morning talk about what happens when you deploy our programs, our brands, and our supply advantage, and the answer is this: this kind of lift. And I heard Marcel talk about synergies. It's interesting, when we talk to investors, we tend to talk a lot about ways that we're saving money. This is ways that we're generating revenue. The Canadian market is not expanding at 30% year-over-year. It means we're taking share. So when we deploy our programs, the Journie Rewards program as, for instance, we deploy our brands that are well known in the markets in which we serve, Pioneer and Chevron, and then we apply our supply advantage, which gives us the lowest cost to serve and allow us to offer the value to consumers, good things happen. And this is something we're very excited about, our team is excited about. And the fact that from start to finish within the Husky network that we converted was a year-long process, start to finish. We're now fully integrated, so finished actually ahead of time and ahead of budget. It's allowed us to also invest in our marketing programs to see that ramp-up happen very quickly. So a great sort of proof point, based on both Marcel and Bob's comments this morning, of how we can take all of these things that we've got, these, these great opportunities we have, to continue to build revenue, steal share, and ultimately serve customers better and differently. Okay. So what opportunities then do you see for growth in right across Canada, and, and how does this inform the way that you think about expanding and maybe strengthening our network? So Bob, this morning, referenced the fact that we think demand over time in Canada will come off, but I want to point out that it's going to come off differently in different geographies. So not every market is treated equally. And what I'd like to communicate this morning is that we are not done growing in Canada. Canada is still a tremendous opportunity, given the scale that we've built, again, the programs that we have in place, and the brands and the credibility that we've established across the Canadian market. So we will continue to invest strategically and thoughtfully to ensure that we're generating the right returns and to ensure that we're meeting customers' needs. So I've got on the slide here three different formats that we're continuing to progress. The traditional format is one that this room would be most familiar with. Those are the sites you're going to today. And what we're doing there is retrofitting locations. All right? We're implementing our brands, we're implementing our food programs, and we're ensuring that these are A and B sites that will, that will last in the long term and will continue to win in the market. The second two, the other two formats are new formats for Parkland, so a highway location, where, again, major thoroughfares, where we believe customers are going to and from some place. Bob described it earlier. No one gets up and says in the morning, "Geez, I really want to get some energy today. Let's put the kids in the car and go see how that works." We're, we're helping them move along the way, so finding locations where there's an opportunity to do so. And then the standalone format, we're really excited about. We've got two standalones in market today, and we're seeing very encouraging results that give us a lot of confidence for the future. The Canadian market is growing. We just hit an all-time high, I think a 65-year growth high. We're over 40 million Canadians now, growing in different pockets. The way I like to describe, you know, as a for instance, in terms of areas of growth for us, take the 407 corridor here, just outside of the city of Toronto, and what that's created in terms of new neighborhoods, new commuting patterns. There's a lot of that happening across Canada and something we want to take advantage of, and then also make sure that we're redeploying capital as well. The Husky transaction is a great example, where we've sold a number of high-value real estate sites, sites that don't make sense for Parkland's business long term. That's roughly CAD 40 million-CAD 50 million. We're reinvesting that into new opportunities like these ones. All right. Thank you so much, Ian. Let's move to Pierre. Oh, we can give him, yes, some applause. I cut you short there... Let's move to Pierre now. Pierre, for some people, the concept of our supply advantage is a little bit tricky to understand, especially when it works hand in hand with our customer-facing brands, how that all works. So maybe you can share some of your experiences bringing our retail and our supply competitive advantages together, and then talk about what that means for Parkland on a whole. Yeah. Thanks, Tara. Great question, and good morning, everyone. It's a privilege to be here to represent the incredible team at Parkland International today. And, you know, supply advantage, number one, is not just about ships and tanks and fuel. It's also about the great brands that we represent. And I wanna talk a little bit about the evolution of our business in Puerto Rico as an example of how we can invest within our two competitive advantages, being the customer advantage and the supply advantage, to generate high organic growth returns. And what we've been doing in Puerto Rico is, I think, an example of the best of Parkland at work, so it's really one Parkland team. And how we develop supply advantage, how we benefit from it, is inextricably linked to the brands and our customer value propositions in the markets. So going back a few years, we inherited an incredible business in Puerto Rico, the number one network. It's about half of our retail business, 170 sites, more or less. But we did not control our destiny in terms of supply. We didn't control the entirety of the CVP with the customer because of a legacy brand relationship. So last year, we took the decision to change brands, and with the support of strategic marketing in the Canadian business, we looked at all of the brands available. We did deep market research, and what we found is that the Mobil brand resonated with our key demographic targets in the Puerto Rico market. We secured that brand. We secured import terminal infrastructure in order to bring in our own barrels. We rolled out the Mobil brand in Puerto Rico. We converted 170 sites in 90 days, which was a record in the Exxon world. No one had done that many sites that fast, ever, anywhere in the world, so kudos to the team who did that safely without a single incident. But we connected through that exercise, you know, an enhanced CVP for the Puerto Rico market, and in so doing, we unlocked supply optionality. So we now import into Puerto Rico safely and reliably using our intermediate storage, our logistics assets. We've lowered our cost to serve. We import over 5 million barrels a year into the market, so we get the full supply chain advantage, the full margin benefit of everything that Parkland brings to the offer. In so doing, we've also enhanced the appearance of our network. It's very, very attractive, and we're very pleased to be rolling it out Journie now. Again, this is something that has been developed. It's the best of the Canadian marketing business, where we have great density, and we're able to lift and shift that with some modification. We've added payment for the Puerto Rico market so that they can pay at the pump, and it really gives us a market-leading CVP. So I think this is an example of hopefully brings to life the supply advantage and what happens when we invest within our two moats, so customer advantage, supply advantage. Thanks, Pierre. So in our international business, upstream discoveries in Guyana and Suriname are creating a tremendous level of economic activity and growth. So how is Parkland positioned to support and prosper from this? Yeah, thanks, thanks, Tara. Guyana and Suriname, Guyana, certainly for the last several years, has been our highest growth market. The GDP growth there is absolutely astounding, and we're very pleased to be, you know, the reliable and safe supplier to the offshore oil and gas industry there. We take care of their lubricant needs, their marine diesel needs, and really how we do that is with our advantaged infrastructure position. You'll see the Rome Depot, top right, or your left. Top to your right. The Rome Depot is our main storage terminal in Guyana, and from there, and from the GYSBI Shore Base, which is just a little ways down, we bunker the vessels that serve the offshore oil and gas industry. So we do that safely, ex-pipe. It... The volume has grown significantly over the past several years, and we've made material investments in infrastructure, so tanks, pipelines, capability, the teams. It's an ISO-certified terminal. It's very safe, and so this is really the supply advantage and the customer CVP and commercial coming together to generate very significant organic growth returns, supported by a big GDP tailwind. At Suriname, we're in the early innings in Suriname, but there have been significant discoveries in that jurisdiction as well, also offshore. We're leveraging the experience of our team in Guyana to develop similar capability in our depot at SUHOZA, which also has an advantage location, so that we can support the offshore oil and gas industry there, as well. Now, one of the ancillary benefits of this GDP boom and the economic development is that it's been great for the consumer, and as we see GDP go up, discretionary spending is going up. We also see the benefits in our retail network, and in convenience. So it's been, it's been a lot of fun. All right. Thank you so much, Pierre. Thanks. Okay, so we heard Pierre speak about our supply advantage and how it comes together with our retail business. So let's turn to Donna, and let's see how our supply advantage and our commercial business really comes together stateside. Thanks, Tara, and good morning, everyone. So I'm gonna talk to you about how supply and commercial come together. What you see on your chart here is a picture, it's a map of the state of Idaho. I'm not sure many of you have been to Idaho, but it's actually quite a, quite a lovely place. On this map, you can see some blue arrows coming in. Actually, some of these arrows can also point outward, but I'll start with the refinery supply. And so there are a number of refineries, none in Idaho, but in Salt Lake City, in Montana and Wyoming, that actually bring product into Idaho via pipeline. However, there's more demand in the market in Idaho than what this pipeline can supply. What we did, we purchased—and just for the colors on the map, so the yellow would be where those pipeline, the product comes in, and you can pick the product up at the rack. What we did was we purchased three storage terminals with rail capacity, and you actually saw a beautiful picture of it in Bob's presentation. And from that, we are able to bring rail cars into the state of Idaho. We do that from Canada. As mentioned by Bob, we obviously have a great position in Canada, and so we can bring the product south. We can also bring the product from other locations in the U.S. via rail. We also then, as part of this purchase, we purchased a pretty large fleet of trucks that enable us to capture and bring product in and out, frankly, of the state, in both directions. And then the last piece is that occasionally, when the timing is right, there's waterborne supply in Pasco, Washington, that we then truck into the market. And so you can see there's a lot of options around how we can supply this market. And as you might expect, there are a number of things that happen on a given day. There's market volatility, the pipeline goes down, a truck rack goes down, something happens. But because we have all of this optionality, it lets us pick and choose in a way to make as much money as we can, bringing supply into the market. And here's where commercial comes in, and frankly, retail. So retail, we have over 100 sites in Idaho. We love this business. It's high margin, it's ratable, they're long-term contracts, 10 years on average, and so we have 100 of those. But then we also have this fantastic commercial business. And I just wanted to color it up for you a little bit, like, what is a commercial customer? It can be a lot of different things. We're not quite farm to table, but we're close with what the sugar beet industry. So Idaho ranks second nationally in the production of sugar beets, and sugar beet farmers plant about 180,000 acres, harvest 6 million tons of sugar beets. And so these sugar beets actually are then used to produce granulated sugar, powdered sugar, a bunch of different sugar products. I actually had the pleasure of going out to market. You can see on the right there, that's me with a farmer. We have 500 customers who are farmers, and this was a farmer. He was quite proud of his operation and actually cut me a sugar beet. I even got to take a taste of it. Then what happens is, there's all these trucks, big trucks. You can see all the trucks lined up that take the sugar beets from the farm to the factories. And so we supply the fuel. In addition to supplying the farmers, we supply the fuel for the trucks. 140,000 truckloads every year delivered to three sugar factories. Guess what? We also supply the three sugar factories. And so you can see all the way along the supply chain, how important we are to this important part of Idaho's economy. The manufacturer, one of the plants, is actually the second-largest beet sugar producer in the U.S., and Idaho produces 12% of the nation's sugar. So it's pretty, pretty impressive stuff. I will also note, we have been doing business with this company, this manufacturer, for 17 years, and so we provide their lubricants for their factories. And so you can see the relationship, the service, and how we are embedded in the fabric of the community as well. And so really, 3.5 million gallons annually of this business from the farm to the factory. All right. Thanks, Donna. She said she was gonna talk about sugar beets, and I didn't know why, but now I do. Yeah. So thanks for that, Donna. Okay, let's move to Darren. You know, we've talked a lot, or we've heard a lot about the energy transition. So, Darren, we've been building an EV charging network in British Columbia. What are you seeing in terms of customers' behaviors, and how is that shaping your forward plan when it comes to this part of the business? Great. Thanks, Tara, and good morning, everybody. It's great to be here. So we have been in the market operating EV chargers at our retail sites for a year now. And I wanna thank a very small, focused team who's built this business from scratch, and they've done a great job. And, you know, as we've discussed, we started this business where the demand is. So we started in the province of B.C., highest EV adoption in the country. And our initial experience has been very positive so far, and in fact, we feel quite strongly that EV charging is a very natural extension to our business. So to bring it to life, I wanna talk about the picture that's on the screen. So this is a site in Hope, BC. This is a highway site. It's at, on a highway that has a lot of traffic, and it also has very constrained EV charging. And in fact, there are long queues that form, in the city of Hope, if you're looking to charge a vehicle. And so what we did to address the market demand is we constructed the largest EV open network, fast charging deployment, that's been built in Canada to date. So you can see part of it on the picture. There's actually 12 charge points, at this site. You can see our Chevron in the back there. And it's really a great example of how it is that we have met, a clear market need in the EV business. If I now pull back and think about our 37 sites in the market and think about utilization, we've seen a much higher demand and higher levels of utilization than we initially anticipated. So we kind of think about our sites in three types of markets. Highway markets, so like this site in Hope. Our second market is, you know, other cities and urban environments. And then the third bucket is downtown Vancouver or dense urban markets. And we found, you know, strong utilization across all three of those, but in particular, very strong utilization in downtown Vancouver. And in fact, we think that dense urban markets like downtown Vancouver are probably the most underserved markets across Canada. So why is that the case? So we see very high levels of multifamily housing. So people don't have lots of great home charging opportunities, so they come to our sites. We also see ride-sharing fleets operating in the area. And we see just lots of traffic kind of flowing through those areas downtown, and there aren't that many charging options. The other thing that our sites really benefit from is density, and we talked a little bit earlier about how we've gone into the market in a very concentrated way. So we have 37 sites in the market, and that's created real network effects. So customers know our brands, they know our value proposition, and they seek out our sites. In fact, customers will go to multiple sites to charge from us, and they know our network very well. Another really core element of what we've been doing in the EV business is providing our customers with more than just a plug. This has really driven utilization and demand further. And, you know, the core for us is that we're providing our customers an attractive place to stop and charge. It's a well-lit location, it's safe, and we've really focused on the amenities. All the things we've been talking about in our retail business today, great C-stores, food options, clean restrooms, you know, all of those things are really quite important for our customers, and they give us great feedback, and they enjoy coming back. The other thing that this business really does for us is it helps us grow our Journie program further. Our customers sign in to Journie, to start and stop their charging session with us. And so this really gives us a unique opportunity, to attract, users into Journie who otherwise wouldn't have the need to sign into the program. And so as we sort of think going forward, about the program and our, and our EV customers, we do look for ways to provide them with Journie points on their charge and other types of rewards, and reward their loyalty. I do want to touch quickly on economics. So we've spent the last couple of years validating, our economic assumptions in this business, and those initial assumptions, you know, still very much hold. So a couple of key drivers I'll talk about. First, utilization. It's a key determinant of site profitability, and we've seen really great trends in utilization, as I've mentioned. Secondly, backcourt conversion. It's a key part of our thesis, and we see about 40% of our EV drivers coming into our backcourt. And then the third element, which helps support our margin, is we generate carbon credits, both from the federal government as well as the provincial B.C. government, and it's an important part of our economics. So path forward. We intend to continue to expand where we see demand. There's continued opportunity in the province of B.C., but we also see lots of demand in Quebec and emerging in Ontario as well. More broadly, we're also exploring ways to help fund this business. We've benefited from government grant programs that have been made available by the provincial government as well as the federal government. We've been very appreciative of that support, but we continue to look at other ways that we can access unique structures that are attractive to fund this really exciting growth business going forward. Good stuff, and we're not letting you off the hook. I still have a little bit more for you. Acquisitions have obviously played a big part in Parkland's growth in the past. So we're currently in a phase that's focused on organic growth, synergy capture, integration. When you look to the future, though, get out your crystal ball, is there a set of circumstances that you would consider acquisitions again? And maybe what are you currently seeing in the market? Sure. Yeah. No, that's a great place to start is what our current focus has been, which has been on organic growth, and integrating and deleveraging, so not M&A. But clearly over time, as we do, deleverage and we will have significant cash flow to allocate, and, you know, we'll consider what the right, value-maximizing thing to do with that cash flow and how to allocate that capital is at the time. I think it's important, though, to remember that we have created a lot of value by acquiring in the past. If you think back to what Ian talked about in the Husky Network, how we acquired that business and created value. Think about what Pierre talked about in Puerto Rico, similar idea, we acquired, and we found a way to enhance value. You know, we have really great teams that know how to buy and integrate, and we've created a ton of value in the process. Now, when we think about what are the criteria for how we might consider M&A in the future, you know, there's really kind of three things that we think about. Number one is hitting our deleveraging target. So lower end of the two to three times target by the end of 2025. Number two is really about pursuing targets that create value and are accretive, you know, which we've always done. And then number three is businesses that are natural additions to our current footprint. And so, I think about all those criteria, we expect that they all probably come together in the latter half of the time period of the guidance that we've given. And again, we'll consider what is the value-maximizing thing for the business at that time, how to allocate that capital. Is it to buybacks or is it to M&A? But to answer your question on, well, what might M&A look like? You know, the consolidation opportunity remains across the business, but it's different in each region. So in the U.S., the market remains incredibly fragmented, and so we have lots of runway to add scale in the markets, in our core markets, where we operate today. In Canada, the market is much more concentrated, and so there, the opportunity is much more, you know, tuck-in transactions where we can strengthen the network that we have. In international, there are smaller tuck-in opportunities in the markets where we currently operate, and then there are opportunities in neighboring markets where we have a clear advantage and have a right to play. If I think about, well, you know, what are the current market dynamics? You know, how does deal flow look at the moment? I think it's important to remember that we've always been focused on creating our own proprietary deal pipeline and our proprietary deal flow, and we continue to maintain those relationships today. But in the markets where we operate, you know, that landscape hasn't been transacting, as we've been focused on integrating and deleveraging. So we really haven't seen any important assets being sold while we've been focused on those activities. So ultimately, we do remain disciplined, and we consider acquisitions in the context of what creates the most value for Parkland, buybacks or growth through M&A. All right. Thank you so much, Darren. Okay, let's shift gears to Ferio here. You're in the hot seat now. We'd like to discuss, you know, Parkland's sustainability, and maybe you can talk about the company's priorities and how sustainability really plays a part in that. Sure. Thanks, thanks, Tara, and good morning, and welcome, everybody, and it's great to be here with you. Look, I'll, I'll just highlight a few of our priorities, and you can see them there on the screen. And right there, dead in the center, is the Drive to Zero. I think you can see this in our sustainability report. The Drive to Zero really is underpinned by reduction. You know, driving to minimize our impact, obviously, on injuries and safety in the workplace, but also our impact on the environment. So when I look at these four priorities and what it means for Parkland, I'll start with safety. At Parkland, you know, we have a saying, so "One injury is one injury too many." And given the diversity of the workforce and the asset base and the type of work that we do, you can see that there's a far-reaching level of risk that comes along with that. A big focus for us is ensuring the well-being and safety of our people. So our standard measurement for safety within Parkland is our total recordable injury frequency rate. And the piece that is of particular interest here is the focus the company has put on this over the course of the last several years. We closed last year at an injury frequency rate of 1.05, which is an 8% reduction year-over-year. What's more profound by that, though, is if we look at this over the course of the last 5-6 years, we've seen a 30% reduction since 2019 in the overall injuries and recordable incidents in the company. We start with safety because our belief on the safety process is with good SOPs, good safety operating procedure, so goes the rest of the business. You've heard much of my colleagues talk about how the business operates with our supply advantage and with our customer advantage and with moving product. If we're doing that safely and we're doing that against a set of high standards, then we know the delivery back to the customer is gonna be done effectively and is gonna be done in a very, very cost-effective fashion without incident. I'll shift to GHG reductions as well, which is the next Drive to Zero, and there's a few priorities that build in, in that regard. One is reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and you'll have seen some touch points of that through the presentations today. I think the piece that I would highlight the most is that, Darren spoke a lot about EV charging. What you're seeing there is not only leveraging capital that we can get through perhaps government funding and other sources, but also investing judiciously and modestly capital in infrastructure that we already have. To get to that point where we're actually meeting customers' needs on GHG reductions, but also at the same time, meeting the demand in those locations where people are looking for that. And then the second piece with respect to that, and I focus on supporting our customers through energy transition, and this is also meeting people and customers in the communities that they serve, is that in places like, for example, Burnaby, we're also investing in infrastructure that we already have to produce and co-process renewable fuels. We're the largest producer in Canada. In fact, 96% of all renewable fuels in Canada are coming from Parkland. And that's that continues to see us grow that market and expand it, again, with existing infrastructure, minimal judicious capital investment, but also meeting the growing needs for our customers and doing our part in terms of the overall reduction. The last piece I will highlight, which is very important to us, and, you heard Bob talk about it earlier in the presentation, is continuing to build upon a very diverse workforce. We have and operate across a wide array of geography and diversity, geography and diversity of assets. With that, has come a very diverse workforce. And in that workforce, we've seen a skill set that is broad and wide-ranging, from food service to retail service, to commercial, all the way up through to manufacturing. And one of our focuses on the people and culture side, in particular, as we move to supporting our sustainability priorities, is continuing to find ways to develop that talent, attract it, retain it, and move it through our organization to broaden broader capabilities. Okay, I'm gonna keep going with that- Okay. because throughout the presentations today, and especially when Bob was talking, we talk a lot about the team. Parkland, the team, the people. So maybe you can just tell me a little bit about what makes the people at Parkland so special. Yeah. Well, look, maybe I'll double-click on this because I think Bob really, really highlighted it well at the beginning of the presentation. We get to stand up here and deliver a great story about Parkland. We get to meet with all of you, investment community, we get out to talk to stakeholders, and it is a privilege, and Pierre said it best as well. There is a group of 6,400+ Parklanders across our entire network that make it easy for us to tell that story. This gives you a sense of sort of the diversity, the tenure, the ethnicity within the company, and you can see how diverse and broad it is. What we have learned with Parkland, and we believe the strategy is a very strong, or our culture is a very strong culture that is very entrepreneurial, commercially intense, focused on safety. One that is fundamental to the roots and the origins of the company, and one that now we embed when we go and do our acquisitions. And so when we do acquisitions, what's very common for us to hear from our, our employees is that they do like being part of Parkland. We bring a sense of discipline to an organization. We bring a methodology in terms of how we operate, and that's typically the playbook that we bring along when we do integrations. And there's two types of integrations for us. So when I think of the people and culture strategy, I think about it as a point of view of how are we building capability with the diversity of talent, skill, and culture that we're bringing in? So we have scope transactions. We're learning from those scope transactions. I think we've seen the benefit that we've got from a scope transaction with M&M Food by bringing us that food expertise. But then we can go all the way upstream to manufacturing and midstream transactions, where we get the integration synergies, but there's also the intangible synergies that come from us actually acquiring that workforce. There are strong capabilities and expertise from different markets that they operate in, and it gives us the flexibility to move that talent throughout the organization, which we've been continuing to do. And then the last piece I'll just highlight on this, which I get... I'm very, very proud of, is that I do believe that Parklanders, that our people are the best ambassadors of our company, irrespective of where they work and what they do. And you see the multitude of brands that we operate in. But if you go in each of those markets, you will see that those brands are highly, highly prominent, and they're highly respected, and we're meeting great customer demand, and that comes from our employees being strong service ambassadors. And proud to say that we do business in several languages. English is obviously predominant, but if you go through our international divisions, you'll see Spanish, French, and Dutch are also prominent languages to which we serve our customers in, which gives us that flexibility to continue to scale and grow and actually be present in those markets. That's where I see sort of the people and culture strategy coming together in terms of building capabilities to then drive that strategy you heard about today, which is optimizing supply, but then meeting customer demands both in the retail and in the commercial side of the business. All right. Thank you, Ferio. Okay. Yes, we can give him an applause. We're going to pass you, Marcel, but I'm sure people will have questions for you in a bit. Bob, I've got one last question for you. We've heard everybody here speak to their strategy and their leadership team and, and what they're doing, but how does this all tie back to, to the main strategy? Yeah. Thanks, Tara. And look, I'd just like to start off by thanking this talented team for the work that they do every day. And look, not only does this team deliver, but they do an amazing job at motivating our team. And Ferio talked about our culture and our values and leading from the front, and this team leads that every day, and they, you, you can see the results that they can deliver. So again, it all starts with the people. We, we have a track record of delivering, starts here, filters down to the organization. We have a track record of delivering ambitious targets, and on top of that, we've invested in a growth platform that'll carry us forward into the future. Some great examples here today of that growth platform in action, whether that's growing the business organically, whether that's integrating businesses, you can see the strength of the business and the value that that drives for our shareholders, which you're seeing in the results. So with that, let's open it up to questions. Actually, before we get that, we want to create a little bit more anticipation for all the questions, 'cause we have a little video that we want to play. Sure. Okay, great. Sorry, Bob. Uwe, he talked a little bit about what we're planning next. Tomorrow, we're inviting and welcoming Aeroplan members to join us in the Journie Rewards. So let's play a little video to teach you a little bit more about what's happening. Get ready for the ultimate Journie Rewards experience. Every stop with Journie Rewards is now an opportunity to earn Aeroplan points. Members can seamlessly link their Journie Rewards and Aeroplan account directly from our app to unlock a world of exclusive perks. By combining the Journie Rewards and Aeroplan network, we are building a strong community of over 12 million members, and finally giving Aeroplan members the chance to earn and redeem points on fuel and convenience purchases. Together with Aeroplan, we are taking Journie Rewards to new heights. Awesome! So make sure you go home and download your Journie Rewards, if you haven't already. Now is the time for the question and answer session. So once again, if you'd like to submit a question, really easy to do so, use Slido. We've also put the QR code back up on the screen here. For those of you in the room, you can just raise your hand. We have a couple of runners, so... Oh, we've got one already. I love it. We'll have one of our runners come your way. We're joined by a lot of people today, both here and online, so just I ask that you ask one question and a quick follow-up. But we do already have something in the queue, so we're gonna start with that one, and Bob, it's to you. What is your level of confidence in Adjusted EBITDA guidance, and have you factored in a recession? Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Tara. We, we have a lot of confidence in the guidance that we've put forward for next year. You know, what gives us that confidence is, first and foremost, the success we've had in the chart that Marcel showed, right? So driving organic growth, the programs that we talked about, the continued traction of those going forward, gives us a lot of confidence that, we'll deliver. Second thing is going after those synergies, which again, we're still have more to do in that area. And again, we've got well-laid-out plans as to how we're going to go after that. And then, you know, finally is, you know, the, the one thing that we've also done is we've actually normalized the refinery, right? So we're not waiting for the refinery to make the numbers. The refinery is low, and we tend to have upside in the refinery compared to our five-year mean. So again, very confident in terms of the base business, how it's gonna perform, and the programs that we have in place to support that, that journey to CAD 2 billion. You know, the other part of the question is, are we worried about a recession? You know, look, I would say one of the things about our business, and we've seen it time-tested through various economic conditions, it is very resilient. You know, ultimately, you know, one of the things that Ian talked about, I've talked about, is demand. You know, people need to run in Canada, in the markets that we're in, people need to drive to live, so they do keep driving. And so that tends to drive our underlying demand. They do keep coming to the convenience channel, and again, if you look historically at the convenience channel, it actually does quite well in recessions because people are still fulfilling that unmet need in our sites. And again, we've got a good, strong offer to go against that. In our commercial business, it is directly levered to GDP growth. Now, how do we offset that? We're in many markets, many customers, many verticals, and ultimately, if we continue to excel in delivering good service, underlined with our strategic assets, we'll continue to grow at or above market in that segment. So again, well-positioned, and typically, our business is resilient as we go through recessions, and we tend to push through it. So again, confident about the CAD 2 billion, independent of the macro environment and what it throws at us. Okay, let's go to the question on the floor over here. Thank you very much. Just continuing on the EBITDA question, if you look beyond 2024, your, your CAGR is about 5.7%, excluding the refinery and your guidance, which is quite a bit higher than what you've normally told us. I think you've normally said something closer to 3%. So just wondering, what might be the two or three opportunities that you think are gonna drive you above that 3% that you had said historically? Yeah, look, why don't I kick that off, and I'll turn it over to Marcel. But again, you know, the tailwind of the investments that we've made, right? So whether that's the organic growth opportunities, the brands, these programs, they're just coming to maturity, and they'll provide a nice tailwind here, which ultimately will manifest itself in gaining market share and higher than average same-store sales in our retail business and volume growth in our commercial business. So we expect to see that, and that's a nice tailwind going into the next few years. The other thing is synergies, and again, back to the penny, right? There's still a lot to do in supply and trading and supply. So as we look sort of forward over the next 24-36 months, there's a good tailwind. We're also re-platforming the business on the IT side, which will allow us to get further synergies, and maybe, Marcel, you wanna talk to that? Yeah, that's a great setup. No, I think part of the growth as well comes from just becoming more efficient, right? And one of the things Bob talked about, through the acquisitions, we've also acquired multiple IT platforms, you know, that we've now come to the size and scale that we can actually integrate them. That's gonna be a heavy lift, lots of people in there. But what it will do for us, so first of all, we'll be able to run what we have today much more efficiently, much more focused on customer service, because it's better, and our employees will actually enjoy it a lot more as well. But it also is the basis for when we do subsequent acquisitions, we'll be able to extract more cost and, you know, kind of integrate much quicker than we have been able to do in the past. So we'll do it at that pace. We have some great partners working with us, you know, as we go through that, but that's, you know, also one of the drivers for that, additional benefit that you see. Okay, let's take a question that was submitted online. What are the costs and expected benefits of the Journie partnership with Aeroplan, and is it part of a larger partnership with Air Canada? I'll turn that over to Uwe. Sure. So, maybe just to explain the structure of how this is going to work, it is a consumer choice to take Aeroplan points or fuel discounts. The consumer choice, this is not layered on top, so there is no incremental cost for our existing customers to offer this choice. We see, though, the penetration of Journie as a result of this partnership growing, and as we add more members on the Journie platform, we see an expense attached to that, but there certainly is a significant offsetting revenue. We talked earlier about the CAD 500 per member per year. There's a big offset in incremental fuel volume and C store volume that comes from it. And that my friend Ian has baked into his business plan for next year, so we need to deliver that volume for Ian and as part of this partnership. Is it part of a larger partnership with Air Canada? I'd say there's opportunity there as we think about EV and other things in our business that you know that team is very much interested in talking to us about. I mean, Air Canada is our preferred supplier to Parkland. I often get asked when I meet with many of you: "How did you get here?" Right? Sort of, "Did you come on a corporate jet or...?" And, our corporate jet has a maple leaf on the back, so we're big, big customers of, of Air Canada. Okay. Do we have a question from the floor? I feel like we do. Right here. Marissa, here we go. Hi, Vishal Shreedhar, National Bank. Can you comment on your organic growth aspirations? Given quarterly variation in fuel margins and refinery performance and the ongoing synergy captures in your expectations, how can we understand what your organic growth expectations are ex synergy? And also, how does management find and understand what organic growth means in this business, given the fuel margin variability, the refinery margins, the turnarounds? Is it volumes? Is it gross margin? Is it EBITDA? How can the street evaluate whether you've been successful in organic growth? Yeah, let me kick that off. So look, good question. You know, I would say first and foremost to the refinery, one of our objectives in 2021 was to reduce the impact of the refinery, not by constraining it, but by outgrowing it. And certainly when we look forward next year, it's about 20% of our EBITDA. So while the asset is ratable, and it is quite ratable from a cash flow perspective, you know, to your point, Vishal, we do have some volatility when we shut the plant down for maintenance. Next year, we don't have that. We do have another turnaround in 2025, but as the business grows, that becomes less and less an impact to the business. Again, it was kind of the price of success with that asset, right? Became much bigger. It became big relative to the size of the business, but we've been able to reduce that. You know, in terms of how do you measure the benefits of our programs, I mean, it's hard to do on a month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter basis. So one of the things that we can point to is our KPIs, right? So we talk about, certainly internally, we talk a lot about market share, and are we winning in the market, and are we gaining market share? It's a metric that is very lagging. You know, generally, we get market share numbers sort of 2-3 quarters lagging. But we can look back, and we do see that we are winning. The second thing is on the retail side, same-store sales growth is a key driver. Also bookended by margin, right? We want to make sure we're growing sales, but we're also growing our margin concurrently. Again, we've been able to print robust same-store sales, whether that's in the backcourt or the forecourt. We'll continue to see that again, driven by these organic programs. That's a bit of an indicator of how we're doing, but ultimately, it manifests itself in the economics, where we can point to the fact that our EBITDA is growing at a faster rate than we're investing, ultimately. Now on the commercial side, we talked about its market share and volume growth. Again, we know that diesel grows at the economy, you know, whether that's 1%, 2%, 3%, and we need to grow faster than that. That's what we hold our teams accountable to. So, you know, I don't know if anybody wants to add to that. That was a pretty fulsome answer, but. Okay. We'll go to Matt here in the back. We've got a question. Maybe just two questions. Marcel, you, you talked about an 11% ROIC, by, by next year. I know this math is overly simplistic, but if I look at the, the rate of your EBITDA growth over the next five years and the, the capital deploy organically, it, it suggests you're getting a return of, like, 14%, 15%. So longer term, do, do, do you see Parkland being an ROIC business that's, that's more in the, the mid to maybe higher teens as, as, as, as you self-fund more of this growth? And then maybe my second question to Darren. You know, the EV strategy looks like it's progressing well. Ian talked about the lift you're getting from the C-store investments. Do you think that opens the opportunity to grow in markets that you don't have a fuel advantage? Like, you can just have an EV plus C-store offering into markets, maybe like a California, where you don't have a fuel advantage, but the EV and the C-store economics are good enough that you generate the appropriate ROIC? Do you wanna talk about ROIC? Yeah. No, I love to talk about ROIC, and we can do so the whole day if you want. No, so to your answer, yes, so 11%+ for 2024, and, you know, with the kind of rates of return we're targeting for new investments, that should be ticking up in that period as we go along. Now, what we've had with Parkland, and if you look back over the last few years, when you're in a high acquisition strategy, right, your ROIC will drop. Doesn't mean the rate of return is actually dropping, but that's just simply how the accounting for the, for the ROIC works when you, when you do them. And then, you know, when all that capital that we deploy, when that starts actually generating both the acquired earnings, as well as the kind of synergies on top of it, it actually starts normalizing and trending to where we should see that. So to your answer, yes, that will occur over time. Great, so the EV question. So we aren't thinking about going into other markets like California, where we're not present in our business today. And I think it actually speaks to a bit of the advantage that we see being in the markets where we are present today. And so there's a really critical element of you know, having a broad network and being able to access that network where we see demand being supportive for EVs. And we can enter a market with density, as I mentioned. And the one key benefit that we have compared to perhaps some others is we can just deploy in our existing network. We don't have to negotiate with other site hosts. Many other EV companies find a region that they like, but then they have to negotiate individual agreements with site hosts to let them on their site. That takes a very long time, it's very laborious, and it's hard to create density. And so by going in where we have an existing network, we can find the specific locations that are attractive, deploy quickly in brands that people know and trust, and really get the benefits quickly, as we've seen so far. Okay, we are closing in on 11:30 A.M., so I wanna get in a couple quick questions before then. Could you speak to the key differences in your C-stores across the different geographies you're in and offer some insight into their respective growth runways? Yeah, look, let me kick off here. So again, our various markets are in different areas of maturity. So if we look at our Canadian business, which we talk about a lot, you know, where we have a lot of sites, we've made a lot of investment, and we're really seeing that offer start to mature and drive. U.S. business is a little behind that because we've just acquired the assets, but, you know, maybe Donna, you can give some sightline into what we're doing with the U.S. retail business and the improvements that we're making there. Yeah. So we're very excited and see a lot of upside in our C-store business in the U.S. We have come together over the years, as about 20 acquisitions in total, and we've converted about 35 locations to On the Run, and we've seen some really positive uplift in store sales. And so the plan for next year, part of the organic growth investment, will be to continue those conversions, make the stores modern, give the full offer, and then even in certain markets, and so I'll use Florida as an example, where food in the C-store is actually the primary reason that customers come to the sites, and so really kind of blowing out that food offer, and the convenience store business will bring good fruit for us. Thank you, Donna. All right, we're gonna- Just quickly- Sure. ... international. So, again, Pierre, maybe you wanna give some highlights on the international business and the retail and- Yeah, we love convenience. Our research and our experience has shown that we have to be thoughtful and measured in terms of the evolution of the markets. We're in developing markets, emerging markets, where we're very sensitive to GDP, so we don't want to invest too far ahead of the discretionary income available in the market. So it's a fit-for-purpose approach, market by market, as their fortunes change. Okay, we're gonna get one more here online, and if we don't get to all the questions here, everyone's gonna be sticking around for a little while, so you can come up and ask everybody. So can you provide more color on the decision to shelve your RD project? Would you consider building RD or SAF production in the U.S. market as demand builds? Yeah, it's a great question, and look, I think it points back to capital discipline at Parkland. I mean, we were well down the path of looking at, and in the design phase of an RD plant. We had a big structural change in the market with the Inflation Reduction Act, which made it much more attractive to put capital into the U.S. You know, our decision was, and fortunately with our capability, is we're better being a trader in that market, a buyer, and to supplement the local market in B.C., primarily with imports. Look, should that change at some point, we could revisit that plan, but certainly it made better sense for us to rely on our capability to move product versus increasing our manufacturing capacity when it was doubtful that we would get the returns, given the attractive investment environment in the US. Okay. I think we have time for one more. We're going Matt, right here. So first of all, so Arnaud from Engine Capital. First of all, thank you very much for all the work you guys do every day, performing and generating the EBITDA. You know, it's easy for people like me to put CAD 2 billion in a spreadsheet, but you guys are the ones who are generating it every day. So thank you for that, and thank you for the presentation. Two questions for Bob, or Marcel. So one, you didn't talk about the CAD 500 million asset sales, and I was curious if that was part of the CAD 6 billion or in addition to the CAD 6 billion. So if you can talk about that. And two, on the CAD 8.50 free cash flow per share, I think you touched on that, but just to clarify, that assume that you are using the balance sheet. So it's either no acquisitions, but you buy back stock, and you get to CAD 8.50, or it's less, or it's more acquisition, less buyback, and you get to the CAD 8.50 that way. But either way, you are using the company's balance sheet to get to the CAD 8.50. I just want to make sure that I understood that. Yeah. So good questions. Let's start off with the first one. We are making good progress on the divestitures. It does take time, and we're confident that we can hit our target of CAD 500 million by the end of 2025. In terms of how that rolls through the numbers, I'll let Marcel- Yes, it's part of the CAD 6 billion. That's part of it. Maybe just on the, on the CAD 850 million. What we kind of have assumed that we'll continue to have our leverage within that range, 2-3 turns. We took out the 3.5, which was our top end, so we stick to the 2-3 turns, and our initial focus is bring it down, you know, to that lower end of the range. But within that, we're comfortable moving. You know, and we'll look at where the market is. It factors into the cost of capital as we make judgments on where to invest money as well. But, you know, we're not gonna kind of just go one way and the other way, and it's all a bit of timing, right? We want to keep that flexibility in the balance sheet, which I talked about. Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. That does conclude our time for today. We really appreciate all of your questions, and we appreciate all of your time. Reminder, if you want to speak to somebody up here, we're going to be mingling around for the next little bit, so please feel free to come up and ask them a question. If you're watching online, just reach out to our investor relations team, and they'll be happy to answer your questions. So that's all for today. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.