Thank you, Mr. Chair.
That's a very good question. In the Northwest Territories, we don't have a lot of infrastructure. If you look at the Gulf of Mexico, they're drilling, on average, 4,000 wells a year. In the Northwest Territories, two near-shore wells have been drilled in the last 10 years. When I compare it to the Gulf of Mexico--you talk about the same season and relief drilling wells--there are a lot of drilling rigs or drilling platforms in the gulf that could be used in the north, unless you specifically require another drill rig to be there as part of the process. You might have to go a long way, and it would take a long time, to get another rig in there.
In my view, and in our government's view, the clean-up cost has to be the responsibility of the operator, or whoever has the lease and is responsible for the drilling. I think it has to be combined with the government, which has the responsibility to make sure there is some infrastructure that would allow them to deal with a spill or an incident. In the Northwest Territories, on the Beaufort side, we don't have any ports, we don't have any oil spill clean-up equipment, so whatever is done would be something the regulators would have to require the operators to provide. And certainly I think the government has a role to play by ensuring that there is infrastructure that would facilitate dealing with any incident.