I'm going to go back to my initial comment. When I said not enough bang, the bank right now only considers pure return on investment in terms of how they calculate what's a useful project to look at.
If the bank would consider tax revenues to Canada or the territorial government as part of that bucket, we'd be fine. We could have a long discussion with them. That's not what they're looking for. They're looking for what can the revenues we're going to charge for users generate to be able to generate a return on investment that they can then market to institutional investors. That's what I meant by saying there's not enough bang for it to work that way.
In terms of the north, we alluded to this notion of sealift. Once a year a ship comes out of Montreal and delivers bulk and dry goods to the communities. This year it didn't make it to the two biggest communities coming out of Hay River. If you think about the cost of somebody.... The relationships with our region are north-south, so the relationships are with Yellowknife and with Edmonton. Our guys go to Edmonton, buy a truck and ship it to Montreal. It's shipped up on a ship, hopefully, and gets delivered to the community. That's an extra $6,000 cost. Instead, if they had this winter road, they'd fly to Edmonton, they'd drive their truck on the winter road back up to the port, and when the ice goes out in the spring, they'd deliver their truck to their own community via barge.
That's the simple answer.
The cost of flying south is huge. This at least gives them some seasonal access initially to be able to drive to the south to lower their cost of actual travel and reduce the sense of isolation. The Northwest Territories is also looking at putting in an all-weather corridor to replace their winter road. This would be phase one. We're working very closely with them, but this is phase one in the opportunity to create an all-season connection from the Northwest Passage to the rest of Canada. We've quantified the value to community, we've quantified the value to the economy, but we haven't talked much about sovereignty and the opportunity it gives Canada to have a deepwater port for DND and the Coast Guard, and the increased safety through search and rescue opportunities.
There's a ship that ran aground in Nunavut this past summer. The first contact from the south was seven hours by a Hercules that flew over. That was it. We got lucky that nothing happened with that grounding, no spills, no fatalities, but who knows what's going to happen the next time.