Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the presenters.
As the member of Parliament for the Northwest Territories, I want to be on record as saying that we know pollution isn't free. We're seeing the cost of forest fires, the droughts and floods and extreme weather and the impact these are having, including impacts on our health. We certainly know that climate change is real. We're at the forefront. We see it on a daily basis. It's happening, and we can't turn a blind eye to it.
We're seeing the cost of insurance to the households in the north skyrocketing. This is concerning not only because it's adding to the burden of running a household, but because many people are dropping household insurance because they just can't afford it anymore. That cost increase is to make up for the costs of all the fires that have been burning across the country, including in the Northwest Territories. We don't have a lot of merchantable timber, but much of it is burning, and we expect more is going to burn.
We have erosion issues. Some of our communities are being washed away. We have quite a bit of frozen silt that made up the islands in the delta, and now we're trying to stop the communities from sliding into the ocean. We're dumping gravel, and it's like driving a truck up and dumping money right into the ocean, because it doesn't stay. We've been told that there are landslides under the Beaufort Sea that are 20 kilometres or 30 kilometres long. These things are all factored into the costs of what's happening to us.
Canada has come up with a framework, and I was really happy to see the government in the Northwest Territories step up and develop their own plan. That plan, however, is not going to kick in until probably July of this year.
You came forward and asked for $10.8 million to administer the federal fuel charge. I'm wondering whether that is only applicable to the backstop jurisdictions and whether it applies to the Northwest Territories.