Thank you very much, Madam Chair, honourable members, ladies and gentlemen.
There are a few materials in my presentation, which may go beyond 10 minutes. I respectfully ask that I might be able to go a few minutes beyond, if you find it interesting, but I'll try to be rapid.
The second page to turn to is a famous statement by William Lyon Mackenzie King, who said, “If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.” This really points to the problem of connectivity and regional disparity. If you look at the map of Canada, the red line depicts where the roads and railways stop, and the circle beyond that is where the regional disparities are the greatest.
We certainly have lots of stuff there that we'd like to get out. It's a treasure chest of minerals and deposits that we could mine economically, but we simply cannot get to them economically. They're stranded.
We have communities, as we have heard, that suffer from very high food prices, bad housing and many other illnesses, social and otherwise, that come with that isolation.
Beyond that, of course, we have sovereignty being threatened. Although it's well and fine to have the ice melting and more transportation access to the north, it also opens us up to more threats from the outside to our sovereignty, which need to be addressed.
Of course, beyond that, the ice roads are melting progressively, and we can see the day coming when they may not be around.
There is a need for a new technology. I always say that if we could do this with what we have, it would be no problem. We would have already solved it. We need to move on to look for something new, and in this case the solution, I believe, is the airships.
If you turn to the next page, I'd submit to you that airships could do for the north what the railway did for western Canada 125 years ago. Before the railways, we had a stone fort and the fur trade, and that was about it. Within 40 years of the railway, Winnipeg was the third-largest city in Canada and a bustling community, and this spread development throughout the west.
I will not try to tell you that we're going to plant wheat in the Arctic. That's not the case, but certainly we can move a long way from where we are, because today we have impassible land masses and very bad poverty conditions. With airships, we can open up mineral developments and other developments in the north.
I'll turn to the next page. You can see that there are quite a number of airship designs. Most of these are conceptual, although some have been built and tested. I would submit to you that the majority of these are not suitable for Arctic conditions. The only two that would be are the one that's been designed in Canada, at the very bottom—the red one—and the Russian airship, which is the second one from the top on the left. Other than that, these airships have not been designed for Arctic conditions, and certainly the inflatable ones would not work.
Flip over again and you'll see the next page. We're suggesting that what we need is a rigid airship. The rigid airship does not change its shape when the temperature changes. That's a great advantage. Of course, it can be built much bigger to carry much larger loads. Going back 80 years, they built airships that would carry 70 tonnes and travel at 80 miles an hour, or 145 kilometres an hour, and cross oceans.
That was 80 years ago. We can match that and do much better today, and do it with materials that already exist. We're not going to reinvent propellers and engines. These things are all certified and available, and we could do that today and do it much better.
Look at the next page, please. If you're going to have an airship carrying cargo, you must have a way of getting the cargo on and off safely and quickly.
Most airships you'll probably envision as being tied to a mast and a weather vane—if the wind changes, they're going to move. You had to have a way of controlling them. Airships are also somewhat unstable in pitch, so they're going up and down as well as moving sideways when the wind is coming. That doesn't mean they're uncontrollable. As you'll see on the bottom left, that is the Zeppelin airship landing under control with nobody on the ground holding ropes, and passengers will be getting on that airship.
Today, with modern equipment, computers and engines, we can control exactly where the airship is, but you still have to land it. There's an unfortunate landing on the one with the one-point landing. Also, at the mast, if a gust comes along and lifts it up, you're going to spill your coffee, so that's not so good.
Go to the next page, please. You can see the giant Zeppelin and its handling system.
They were aware of this. They had problems even just putting fuel on, so the Germans built a railway track. It had the radius of the airship's length. The airship was about 800 feet long, so that track was roughly a mile in length. It worked very well, because the railway car tied to the last fin would hold the airship down and reduce its speed in turning with the wind. However, it's impractical for the north. Finding a square mile of flat land and moving railway track and a rail car there is simply not a feasible solution for us, so we have to look for something different.
If you go to the next page, you'll see that our solution—an old idea put forward in the 1920s, although not built—is to land the airship on a turntable. The airship would come along and hold steady over a turntable with its engines, direct into the wind, to the turntable and to its docking system. A line would drop, and basically you would winch the airship down to the turntable deck, much like you land a helicopter on a destroyer. Once it hits the deck, obviously, clamps would grab it; then you power down and you can now control it. If anybody is on the turntable and the airship moves, they're safe—or they move with it, which is the idea.
Turntables, by the way, are very old technology. They've been around a long time, and there are some very big ones. Any revolving restaurant, essentially, is a turntable. That size would be what we'd need.
On the next page, you can see they are essentially built in pieces, which is very nice because you can bring pieces in and assemble them at a spot. It's not as though you'd have to bring it all at once. By the way, we call this a buoyant aircraft rotating terminal, a BART. What we envision is a main supply base that the airship would leave from—essentially, wherever the roads stop. In Manitoba, a place like Thompson, where the roads stop, would be the supply base. You'd truck to there, then you'd go on by airship from that point. You'd have BARTs in the various communities outside and go from there.
On the next slide, we can see the impacts of an airship. We refer to this as an electric airship. We're looking at electric motors, as opposed to engines. They're much more reliable in the cold. In fact, we're looking at an airship that we'd power eventually with hydrogen, an airship powered by fuel cells with zero carbon emissions. We're going to be one of the few who will be immune to any of these pollution charges, because we won't have any.
What can we see in terms of the impacts? In terms of northern food security, $4.99 for a kilogram of bananas was the price just this past spring in St. Theresa Point. It's only 200 kilometres north of Winnipeg, but because it's beyond the roads, the prices are high.
It's certainly an opportunity for sustainable development, new employment in manufacturing, national security, improved health. If you're poor and you're in a place with high food prices, the best bang for your buck is sugar and fat. If you live on that long enough, you'll have diabetes, and that's a problem we see in much of the north, and of course with the ice roads.
Moving on to the general benefits of the airship, we think this could be a $10-billion increase in the Canadian economy. It would come from various places—certainly from mining. Just a 5% increase in the mining capacity would be a big part of that. We could see reduced government subsidies for the north. It would make anything done in the north less expensive, because the costs would be lower. It would improve our sovereignty. It would add investment and export sales and new opportunities for transport of things such as wind turbine blades, which you cannot move now with any other means because they're so long.
Finally, of course, there's climate change—
