Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for your presentation. I have a question for you and perhaps you can provide me with a few explanations.
I'm most interested to know. These principles are familiar; a previous government articulated them on December 14, 2004. There have been other references to the north. Then we have some program elements. We asked the question last time of the Minister of Transport, but he wasn't able to answer it, but we're hoping maybe it will be answered at the bureaucratic level.
We've been told by the people from transportation it is DIAND that has the lead. What are the goals and outcomes we want here? In other words, we don't want it just to become 2005 to 2009 to some other future date. How do these things integrate, and what are we trying to accomplish? The general words have been there. We know roughly what devolution looks like. There are some ideas about economic development, but have we got to the point that we actually have a plan? In other words, do we know how many northerners are going to be employed? Do we know which businesses and how quickly we hope to get results from them? Do we know we need only one icebreaker and not three, which was originally promised?
How were those kinds of decisions arrived at, if we don't know what our outcomes are? Otherwise, frankly, it has the feeling of a symbolic move forward. For example, we're told that in the arctic waters there is not a lot of activity going on where we're extending our environmental protection, so not a lot needs to happen right away.
Perhaps there is some integrated document, something you could point us to, so that we could be assured that we really are talking here about goals and outcomes. We want to know that the government and the ministry, in its coordinating role, have put everybody on a program that will have tangible results in six months, in a year, in five years, and we will all recognize those, so that these are not just disparate things that are done because it's good for the north.