Thanks.
Through the Inuit-Crown partnership table, we have worked with the federal government to identify 79 projects over the next 10 years that total approximately $30 billion and would close the infrastructure deficit between Inuit and the rest of Canada, or our homeland and the rest of the country.
As an example, there's one deepwater port across our 51 communities. All of our communities are either at tidewater in a marine environment or in fresh water and adjacent to a marine environment.
In the conversations around nation-building projects, we have also identified a number of different key infrastructure deficits, such as the paving of airstrips in a number of our communities, which limit the ability for airlines to get goods and services out of our communities and to be able to fly in all types of weather. This ultimately drives up the prices that people pay to travel and of any goods and services that come into our communities.
Those are just two examples of the work we're trying to do to identify, articulate and, hopefully, solve the infrastructure crisis.
The other piece here is housing. Wherever you go across Inuit Nunangat, that's the first thing you'll hear. Inuit and all people who live in our homeland will say that we have a housing crisis. We have 52% overcrowding. In our pre-budget submission, we identified roughly 6,500 units that are needed in the next 10 years and over 4,500 units that either need to be improved or need funds for operation and maintenance, which will also cost approximately $8 billion.
This is the price of being an Arctic state and of the really troubled history of Inuit colonization in the area, which has led to these systemic barriers for us to be a part of this nation's economy and, generally, to be healthy and live fulfilling lives.