Thank you.
Ms. Kolt, you've spoken about how having a CBC presence helps us share the information we need in terms of world events, politics, arts and culture. It's also important in terms of public emergencies. Significant fires raged in northern Manitoba this past summer, a number of them around Flin Flon. The one by Cranberry Portage, as we know, also very close to Flin Flon, forced a last-minute evacuation. That fire was so intense that it also burned fibre optic lines going to Flin Flon, leaving Flin Flon, one of the largest communities in our region, without Internet for days.
We know that Arctic Radio did heroic work in informing local citizens of that reality, but the reality is that we didn't have a CBC presence here in our north to speak to this public emergency, to speak to the domino effect of what these wildfires meant to our communities in terms of losing Internet service and telecommunications. More importantly, it didn't give voice to this crisis out of our north.
How critical is it to have locally and regionally based media like the CBC to speak to this reality, this precarity, especially as we know that public emergencies like wildfires risk being a more serious part of our reality here in northern Manitoba?