I guess I'd echo that about the infrastructure, particularly things like redundancy in communications. That satellite outage, which many of you may have known about earlier this fall, had a very significant impact, not only on our operations but on communities and businesses all across the north, where parts of Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut were completely out of communication with the world.
For those businesses that have set up in Nunavut that are trying to operate global businesses so they can compete, basically they were out of commission, some of them, for three or four days. You can't survive in a business environment when you don't have reliable telecommunications and reliable Internet, not in this day and age.
I wanted to provide a clarification with respect to timelines. It's not just the board assessment processes that are the problem. Often much of the problem is the federal permitting afterwards, or the other permitting agencies afterwards, which don't have those timelines.
That's particularly one role that the northern projects office could assist with, as project champion or.... Really, their role could be to help communication between those federal departments, and hold them accountable to the timelines, which would also help the boards to do their job because they could push some of those federal departments to provide the information to the boards in a more timely manner, and maybe get under the timeline, so that the boards could be under their timelines.
It's very difficult for the boards to try to push federal departments to provide information in a timely manner. The federal departments are also understaffed and busy, and many of the ministerial sign-offs that are required take ages—the projects sit on the desks of bureaucrats and we just don't get sign-off on permits. On that one Fisheries authorization that Chris referenced earlier, the EA had been done and then it took four years to get it signed off. Nothing changed in that four years, but it just took that long to get it signed off.
Thanks.