Thank you for the question.
In the northern part of Ontario--and I realize this is not a federal thing at this point in time--right now we're fighting issues such as representation at the provincial and federal levels. Our populations are going down. Literally trillions of dollars of resources have been taken from northern Ontario, and you can only imagine the number of tax dollars that flow through because of the resources that are taken out of the ground.
We have to maintain and we have to do a lot of things in the areas where a lot of these resources are taken from in order to prolong life and to continue further expansion and further development in those areas.
The City of Greater Sudbury is here today not to lobby for the refinery in Capreol--which is the town I'm from, by the way--but rather to lobby from the point of view that northern Ontario, as an entity, produces an awful lot of wealth for the entire country and for the province of Ontario. We think it's very fair that some of those dollars go back and continue to encourage development and further growth in those areas.
We realize there is going to be a corporate decision on the business case, especially for where the refinery is going to be set up, and there are no two ways about that. We stand on our strength as being a good location for it, but again, that's not why we're here.
I mentioned a couple of things in my talk. One was using the whole idea of the Ring of Fire not as an entity unto itself but as a pathway to the future for all of Canada. I've heard that the potential for wealth in the James Bay area is half again larger than in the Sudbury-Timmins area, or maybe twice as large, and that's huge.
If you take that area, and Attawapiskat and Moosonee and James Bay, and you take the sovereignty of northern Canada, then rather than treating this just as the Ring of Fire unto itself, treat it as a way for the northern part of Canada to protect sovereignty and perhaps develop even further resources in that area.