Yes. Thank you, Honourable Amos.
In our area in the northeast section of Manitoba, we look at all-weather road access ending isolation as a top priority for our region. Everything else you want to do in terms of improving, upgrading, rebuilding, or building new infrastructure is hooked to access. We have only fly-in communities north of us now. When you go to build new schools, when you go to do sewer and water projects and all those kinds of things, you're tied to a 30- or 40-day window of a winter road. Everything is tripled in cost when it comes to a winter road, whether it be construction costs or delays. In the first nation communities that are isolated in northern Manitoba, we can't help but get into cost overruns with every project we do.
These things present tremendous burdens on our first nation chiefs and councils, because you're always behind the eight ball. When you take on a big project, which you don't want to say no to—you know you need the infrastructure—you can't help but go in the hole on all these projects because of isolation. There is no proper road to get stuff in there.
There's a lot of waste. A lot of concrete that is shipped up north from Winnipeg comes in big, round concrete bags, three or four feet around and three or four feet high. We have no storage up north, and concrete is humidity-sensitive. It comes in on a winter road in March and gets dumped on the ground, because we have no infrastructure for warehousing or humidity or that kind of stuff. By the time you're ready to build in May, when the frost is out of the ground, those things are all hard. Then you wait until next year to get another shipment in.
On and on it goes. All of these things are tremendously wasteful in terms of trying to do infrastructure in the north. Without access, we can't build properly. That's why I say that roads are number one. The next priority is in terms of our communities—our community roads, sewer and water, and infrastructure like that. We need access.
