Thanks, Chair, and thanks, gentlemen.
Mr. Morrison and Mr. Gingerich, in both of your presentations you used the expression “use it or lose it”. Since that statement was uttered by the Prime Minister, a lot of people have come to me and said, “Yes, use it or lose it--or potentially abuse it”.
Mr. Morrison, I'm trying to get a sense of your technology and your experience. In the case of Gedex, it's fabulous technology, by the sounds of it. In your presentation, the only applications I heard about related to use in “petroleum, mineral and sovereignty purposes”. Interesting.
And Mr. Gingerich, you said in here, “'Use it or lose it'; you must first know what it is in order to use”.
I want to get your sense of whether we really know what it is and what's going on. Both of your presentations have been corralled to traditional natural resource discussion and debate, right? It's stuff we're going to dig up, stuff we're going to drill for, stuff we're going to convert perhaps, and stuff we're going to sell. But I want to get a sense of....
For example, in your case, Mr. Morrison, with your technology, you say here, “A gravity gradiometer can map through rock, ice and under water to depths exceeding 10 km.” That's incredible.
Can your technology track the beluga whale? Can it monitor the activity of straddling stocks in the Arctic Ocean? Can it take snapshots about the effects of drilling, for example, on shorelines? Can it examine and help us understand the state of play of the tundra? For example, how many boreholes are there? What is the overall carrying capacity? How many have been backfilled with concrete? How many cutlines have been cut throughout the Northwest Territories in the north? What are the overall effects of those activities on carrying capacity?
Perhaps you could just give some thought to that, and then you could come back to me on it.
To Mr. Gingerich, in terms of knowing what it is, isn't it important for us to know, as a country, more than simply mineral potential and fossil fuel potential? What about biodiversity? What about species at risk? What about flora and fauna?
We continue to corral the debate here in this old Canadian hewer of wood and drawer of water context. In Costa Rica now, they're negotiating with the top three pharmaceutical firms for bioprospecting. They know that the future is going to be about the DNA--who has it, who doesn't have it, and what we can do with that DNA in terms of bioprospecting.
I don't hear any talk on that from major technology and investment players. I'm not saying you should be in this business, but I want to get a sense from both of you, if I could now, on how you see this application of technology and potential beyond minerals and oil and gas.