Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon to each of you. It's good to have you with us as we clue up what has been an extensive study of northern economic development.
Almost every presentation we have heard has related to the lack of infrastructure, in one form or another. If you had your choice, what would you want to see in terms of infrastructure? Maybe you have one or two top choices. That might be hard, as there are just so many.
My question as well is to Mr. Mackey. You raised a point again, and we've heard it a number of times: the shipment of goods by air is, of course, very expensive. There is one sealift a year. Is this still the reality with the expanded season, with less ice coverage? We hear, and some of the shipping interests in my area seem to think we could have a regular shipping season now going into certain ports, in Nunavut, for instance, perhaps for four or five months of the year, if, say, a roll-on, roll-off dock were in certain ports.
So I'm just wondering about that.
For Mr. Missal I have a little more of a direct question. If we build infrastructure, or if the government per se built infrastructure, and your mine was x number of kilometres away, do we build infrastructure for your mine in particular, or do we build it for the community there and then try to tie the two together? Your mine could be 300 kilometres north of a community, and if we build a dock for the mining company, every mining company is going to want one next to their mine. But there has to be some vision around tying the infrastructure development into the mining or other types of development.
I'd just like to have your comments on those.