Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, gentlemen, for all showing up today and presenting your information to us.
I had the privilege last weekend of being in northern Ontario, in Treaty No. 3 territory, and meeting with some folks out there. In a follow-up to that, this week I got a letter from one of the chiefs of the first nations out there. He talks about the nutrition north program. In general, it's just not meeting the needs in their area. He said it's not measuring up. I'm going to try to summarize quickly.
As an alternative solution, he's requesting:
...consideration to defer a portion of the allocated NNC budget to projects that empower us to grow our fresh produce locally. We firmly believe that we can create partnerships with organizations that have developed successful technologies utilizing controlled environment agriculture units.
He goes on to define that.
Finally he closes with the following:
In closing, the opportunity to harness these technologies will create greater self-sustainability for our communities and less reliance on government intervention programming. The year-round endeavour will feed our people and create employment and economic stimuli.
In your response to my colleague Mr. Zimmer before, you talked about the CanNor program and it providing some funding to, if I grasped it rightly, this kind of endeavour. We quickly looked on their website and saw that money has been invested in the Northwest Territories to this point, if I'm not mistaken.
Is there opportunity in some of the northern provinces for that type of innovative solution to the food security challenges?