Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to say that I for one applaud the fact that the transparency act is gone, as do I think a lot of aboriginal people in the north for sure, and probably aboriginal populations across Canada. I've worked with many companies in the Northwest Territories, companies that aboriginal band councils had shares in, and this act tripped us up non-stop. Every affiliate that the council had a share in had to disclose its revenues, so the competition saw that and the potential partners walked away because they didn't want to be involved with companies or band council projects that also had to disclose.
It was not a good act. It went against the principle of own-source revenue generation. We're trying to create healthy communities. We're trying to create independent communities. This didn't help that. It flies in the face of the nation-to-nation concept, and I'm glad it's gone.
On the nutrition north program review, I'm hoping that we're taking a holistic approach on how we move forward on that front. I still think— and I've mentioned this before, so it's not going to be a surprise—that we need to pull in the Department of Transportation to take a look at the size of the runways in our smaller aboriginal communities. We have runways that are just short of the length that is needed to allow the larger cargo planes to land, so we have planes landing with half a load. We have planes landing with half the seats filled. In my campaign, I witnessed some communities where people had to wait: a plane landed with 18 seats and only nine people could get on.
I think that if we're going to make a change, then we have to include looking at other things, not only the subsidy. The $60-million subsidy is one thing that's going to be ongoing forever, but if we change the length of runways and we start building roads, we're going to eliminate that subsidy. We also have to include community gardens and local wild foods. Those things should be part of the review or part of the consideration as we move forward.
Maybe I could ask you to talk to those points, if you would.