Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses. My name is Greg Rickford, and I am the member of Parliament for the great riding of Kenora of northwestern Ontario--or “Mantario”, as we prefer to call it.
We share some common elements in terms of our size and some of the challenges with respect to transporting materials to isolated and remote communities. Certainly, Mr. Austin, I hear you on a number of key municipal issues. I'm going to flesh out some of that, but unfortunately within the confines of five minutes I may not get there.
I do want to say, gentlemen, that one of the things we're finding in the Kenora riding is our region can't sustain the kinds of companies that are required for some of the larger-scale projects. We accept that to a certain extent. So what we've done, Mr. Austin, which you might have some appreciation of, is we worked within the towns and cities and we have inventoried the projects that have evolved from the Building Canada fund, the infrastructure stimulus fund, recreational infrastructure Canada program, and Canada's community adjustment fund on a community-to-community basis to understand the province's and the federal government's employment programs, the people who have been awarded those contracts in cases where that's already been completed, and obviously anybody else in the private sector in those communities to understand how we can get the most out of local people for local projects. That's a context thing.
My questions may be for Mr. Austin and Mr. Holmes. I want to talk briefly in the last couple of minutes here about tourism, predominantly as the chair of the all-party tourism caucus and working closely with the Canadian Tourism Commission and TIAC, the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. Today we're hosting a wonderful event I can't be there for.
Mr. Alexander, you raised some issues around human resource capacity and capital access with respect to first nations and tourism. I'm going to refer to Mr. Holmes's comments about the number of settled land claim agreements, which I know have provided significant resources for things like tourism and mining in the process of settling those claims. I would think of the southwest Yukon project that established the settlement of a land claim in the Alsek Renewable Resource Council that identified specific dollars for those communities to develop those sectors.
Can you speak more specifically to both if there's time on what existing human resource capacity issues and capital access issues are out there when these resources were made available through part of those land claims, in significant amounts, in my understanding?