There is going to have to be a considerable amount of technical, environmental, and scientific work done for anybody to make an informed decision.
The Government of the Northwest Territories has some of its own hydroelectric aspirations. We have one small development, but it's big for us; it could go up to 120 megawatts. We are actively pursuing mini-hydro where it makes sense in a number of communities.
When it comes to the big river, the Slave River, the concerns are going to be around the cumulative impact--Bennett Dam, Site C, Dunvegan--and what's happening in the mountains. The issue for me keeps coming back to the headwaters and what's happening in the mountains, where the water emanates from, with global warming, the shrinking glacier snowpack. Also, there's the cumulative impact going downstream with extraction or impoundment for different human activities, the increased evaporation, the warming temperatures, the changed snowfall and rain patterns.
I've been telling people that we have to get the work done so they can make an informed decision. The dam on the Slave River is going to be somewhere around a $5 billion-plus project if they were to proceed. That's a serious amount of money. The last time the Alberta government was there was in the 1980s. They looked at it, and at the time they walked away. The minister of the day was Minister Bob Bogle. He said they'd be back, and they're back. Now we have to see. The environment has changed. They have a lot of baseline data from the 1980s and a lot of work to do to fill in the gaps.
You're going to have folks like François from the Smith's Landing First Nation, which will be fighting passionately and desperately to protect their traditional lands. It's going to be a very complicated, protracted process. We have a huge World Heritage Site with the Wood Buffalo National Park, pelicans, any number of things around there. People all the way to the Arctic Ocean are going to want to know what's going to be happening. It's not going to be like last time, where they looked at it just as a regional issue. People know only too well, after the Bennett Dam, that we are all going to be affected.