Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This is an important question, and I would say that no, in our experience at Transport Canada, local communities, I think, intuitively.... I should back up one point. In the development of the current transportation 2030 policy agenda, Minister Garneau and Transport Canada held extensive consultations over the course of 2016—dozens and dozens of round tables in every part of the country. Canadians came out and talked about what was important to them in terms of transportation policy. Without exception, local communities understood intuitively and strongly the value of transportation infrastructure, in terms of the quality of life for those communities. That is particularly true in the northern and remote communities where often, as the Auditor General correctly points out, the airports and aerodromes that he examined, in the vast majority of cases, are the only transportation link. So there was a keenness in the communities to expand and improve this infrastructure. I don't think we've ever encountered resistance. I think the question is, in a remote northern area, when you have a relatively low total number of travellers moving and you have very high costs of building and maintaining, how does one get the resources aligned to be able to expand that transportation infrastructure?
I would say the willingness is there and the challenge is to bring the partners together to figure out how to organize the investments to expand that capacity. That was the core logic and motivation behind the structure of the national trade corridors fund, including the special allocation for the territorial north.