Thank you, Chair.
I want to relate something. I worked in the Arctic when I was younger—it's been a long time since I was up there. I was a fishing guide on Great Bear Lake when I was a university student. For everything we did, the utmost in planning had to be done. Everything you needed to have there that summer had to come in on an ice road during the preceding winter. So everything was a year out in planning cycles, when it came to transportation. The last thing you wanted in the operation of your organization was to have to pay for somebody to fly something in, because it was so expensive.
We flew people; that was the main thing. We used float planes, of course, because we could get by with float planes. We used gravel road airstrips at the mine in Port Radium. I don't know whether you people have been up to Port Radium at all. We would shuttle people back and forth: we'd rent a Twin Otter to ferry people back and forth, and we'd have an old de Havilland Beaver on standby to take people around to various outposts, and so on.
I remember very specifically back then that just for gravel road runway maintenance, we would go over there by boat and would pick rocks off the runway at all hours. Of course, you could do that in early July, because the sun doesn't really go down. You could do all those kinds of things.
Just from that perspective alone, it was a ton of work. There was always the scuttle back then that they were going to build a road, that some day people were going to be able to drive up to visit Great Bear Lake. The only way you can get there is either by river—navigating across that way—or by flying.
Mr. Sibbeston, you were very eloquent in your presentation about having ways to provide incentives for the private sector to engage in the building of these kinds of.... How do you foresee building a...? The amount of effort, if you look at the terrain there—the amount of engineering, the number of obstacles in your way.... I mean, 60% of the land mass up there is actually not land mass; it's water.
How are we going to do that? Do you have something specific? Are there ideas that have been talked about? What can we do to get the private sector to be more involved and more engaged in this? Building a road up that valley would cost billions of dollars.