Thank you.
In regard to what the mayor is saying, there has been no help whatsoever since this moratorium. We have the road built now. There's no funding for a restaurant to buy coffee and no hotels in Tuk. It's all B & Bs. We've had over 5,000 visitors. When I was driving out of Tuk, the day before yesterday, there was a 40-foot camper that was still trying to come to Tuk in -15°C and it's all whiteout now.
That being said, getting back to that moratorium, you basically handcuffed us in regard to anything that's going to go on—or no, sorry, whoever did it. I'm just saying it has to be lifted. We want to work. We want to be able to do good for our people.
In regard to the offshore, as the mayor said, we've been doing it since.... We were doing it in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. We were doing it before the east coast. That's where the action was happening in the 1980s, in Tuktoyaktuk. All the ice technology was done in Tuk. Now, all the icebreaker technology has been all over; that same hull is being designed now.
There are so many pieces to the puzzle. You can go back and say, “this, this and this”, but at the end of the day, we just need that moratorium lifted, to give our opportunity to us. You may not hear our territorial government beating the drum for us, saying that we need that lifted, but we do need it lifted for the people we represent, the people of Tuktoyaktuk. If you get the oil and gas going there, you're going to affect nine communities that surround Tuk.
The mayor of Churchill said we're going to affect nine communities. Even in Nunavut, from Kugluktuk on this side, they always came to Tuk to work because we had fly-in, fly-out. Yellowknife is just like a big vacuum. Yellowknife got their diamond mine, so everything is okay for them. They're okay. They have jobs. People in the smaller rural communities, in the Nunakput area and the coastline communities, they're the ones who are hurting. Our youth are hurting.
You guys have it pretty cushy down here, in regard to living. If you come up to Tuk and come visit, you'll see our youth. We need help from this government to lift that moratorium.