Thank you very much for coming, and welcome, all of you, to the north.
You all have a copy of the package that we submitted. Rather than go through the specifics of it, I'll just say this region—both Nunavut and the Northwest Territories—is very lightly served by infrastructure. In fact, almost half of our communities don't have all-weather road service. That drives the cost of putting infrastructure into these communities to a high rate. The majority of the communities don't have actual piped water and sewer. They rely on truck water and sewer. There's been some work done to try to develop additional water treatment plants and whatnot, but without accessibility, that all takes a lot of extra money. This comment has already been put forward, but accessibility in the north is very difficult without having additional infrastructure investment. We have a small economy—there are 40,000 people here in the Northwest Territories, and it's similar in Nunavut—so you can't physically pay for that infrastructure, and that impedes economic development.
We would strongly encourage the federal government, when looking at putting money in and developing the resources to support infrastructure, to work with the current structures, such as the governments that are there, rather than developing another infrastructure. We've seen past efforts made to try to put in additional resources, for example, setting up a different way of funnelling the money through or putting the resources in. It becomes very tedious and it's hard to make sure that everything is supported there.
Comments were made that the majority of money that's spent on development of infrastructure actually flows through to southern Canada. The comments come back, “It's a small population, why should we put that much money here?” If you look at developing a mine or road up here, I would say that probably 80% of the money flows through the south, whether it's through employment income, taxes on fuel, the actual cost of fuel, or the structures. We don't have a lot of those facilities here, so the money is actually flowing back through to southern Canada, and it helps everything else.
To get to the two specific questions that you had, we don't have a lot of comments on how you help Canadians be more productive, beyond support for education and training. That really needs a push.
What federal measures would help Canadian business to be more productive and competitive? I don't think it's a secret out there that there's not a lot of businesses that are in support of the proposed tax reforms, so it should be delayed and looked at as to what the reality is. There's some talk about taking the dormant money out of small businesses. I was talking to some of my colleagues here, and they're not really sure what dormant capital is in small business, especially in the north. You utilize everything that you can, and access to capital is a big shortfall.
I have one suggestion. Going back many years, the federal government had an investment tax credit that actually encouraged businesses to invest in equipment. We have a situation here right now where we're looking to try to reduce our carbon footprint. One of the ways is to try to invest in new equipment and to use more fuel-efficient equipment. That whole process should be reviewed, for two reasons. It allows businesses to be upgrading their equipment and to be more competitive in the field, and it also reduces the consumption of diesels and whatnot. We support the Canadian Construction Association's initiatives and their submissions to your group here.
That's the gist of our presentation. As I said, you have the formal copy; I just wanted to speak to it.
Thank you.