Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our two witnesses for being here today.
There was some talk earlier about how a smaller company, because of certain thresholds, couldn't afford to go on. It brought to mind a story I'd been told by a friend when I worked in the territories, of how he had been offered a share of a little company in exchange for work. He had been offered it for many years.
That little company from which he turned down work-for-shares property now runs one of the diamond mines up north. So little prospectors are often very tight for funds.
How often do you think it happens, in your experience, that individual prospectors, people who are two-, three-, or four-person firms, end up unable to proceed with their work plan or go ahead because of these regulations? Is this frequent? Is this rare? Effectively, do we now have...if it isn't a company of a certain size, it practically can't operate? How frequent are the sort of stories I referred to and that you shared earlier?