Thanks to everybody who has presented here today.
I am very interested in the presentation that was made on clean energy. I listened very carefully. This is an issue that affects us in the north quite a bit. It's a big issue for us. We're seeing the impacts of climate change like nowhere else in Canada, and it's really causing a lot of concern. It's causing issues with our structures and our transportation systems, and it's also causing a lot of problems in the aboriginal communities, the aboriginal population, because climate change has changed the way we've done things historically. Our elders, our leaders, are no longer viewed as the experts on the best place to hunt, how animals migrate, or the best place to cross a river. All that is changed so much that youth don't go to the elders as much. Google, of course, has also played a role in that. The relationship has changed, and it has caused deterioration of the language. Technology has also done that, but this is really a big issue for us. We've been looking at ways to lessen the impact from what we do, because all our communities depend on diesel for power, and a lot of our houses use diesel-generated heat.
We've tried and continue to try solar. Solar is something that has been touted as the way to go across Canada, but we have many months of darkness, so it's a challenge to have solar. It works if you pair it up with something else.
We've looked at wind. Up to now, wind has been difficult because the products usually come from a different country. It's hard to get parts and even harder to find somebody who will install the parts, so it could take you six months to get the parts and then another year maybe to get somebody who will come up to the north, or to find somebody who will come up, so it's difficult to say it's going to work. We are testing. We have a big project going on in Inuvik, and we're moving forward on biomass in some of the southern parts of the territories, and it looks like that will work fairly well.
Geothermal has got potential. The expertise has been very limited in that area. Nuclear is like a swear word if you mention it in the north. People don't even want to explore or discuss that. Although it may have the answers that we need, we can't get past the backlash of that suggestion. We also have all kinds of opportunities there for hydro power if we can find the resources.
I've had the opportunity to try hybrid vehicles, electric-gas vehicles, right up as far north as Inuvik, and they work very well. I was very surprised when I went out at -45°C and the vehicle started. It performed quite well, except the hybrid vehicles that we were testing started spending more time on the back of trucks heading south to get repaired than being used.
We also tried out the smart car. The government's Department of Transportation bought the smart car for the staff to use, but we started to notice the smart car couldn't be found because the staff were hiding it in some of the shops and garages where nobody could find it because they didn't like it. It was not good to drive in snow; that was hard on the vehicle.
When you talked, you said from coast to coast, but we have three coasts. You didn't say anything about the north. I'm keen to see what the potential is for electric cars in the north. We have no way to charge an electric car right now, and the installation of that will be very expensive. Will it work? Has it been tested so that it will work in the north?