Thank you, Madam Chair.
Continuing on the second point, our view is the NTCF is not large enough in its current form to do any more than to support small components of larger projects. The NTCF can help to remove bottlenecks within existing corridors, but cannot fund wholesale transformation or development of new trade corridors.
Three, the NTCF's efficacy as a potential source of funding for nation-building projects appears to have been eliminated by the federal government allocating too much capital to the Canada Infrastructure Bank. This is an entity that presently seems unable to do much for nation-building projects in remote regions. As a former banker, I know that hiring bankers to oversee investments in nation-building projects with strong public policy benefits but meagre commercial returns is unlikely to work, and doubly so for the territorial north. This may be part of the reason that the Infrastructure Bank appears to have had such a hard time getting money out the door. Perhaps it's time to reduce monies under the bank's program and reallocate to the NTCF.
Four, another point worth noting is the NTCF currently does not fund legal fees, period. In isolation, the ineligibility of legal fees makes some sense in that the federal government probably does not want to pay third party lawyers to fight Canada on permitting matters. However, this suggests an unfamiliarity of how northern permitting processes work, especially in environmental assessments. In Nunavut, the process is managed under the Nunavut Planning and Project Assessment Act, through the Nunavut Impact Review Board. Environmental assessments of major projects in Nunavut have a significant legal component to them. Proponents require legal counsel to help guide their projects through the legislative and land claims-based permitting processes. An unwillingness to fund legal fees puts a real strain on the limited resources of indigenous groups, such as KIA, which seek to be proponents of trade corridor projects. We recommend that reasonable legal fees for territorial proponents be included as eligible NTCF expenses going forward.
Five, we understand that the territory allocation for NTCF has been refined to include northern and remote regions of provinces. This, too, strikes us as being counterproductive. We understood the intent of the territorial northern allocation was to give the territories a leg up given their challenging fiscal situations. For territorial governments, own-sourced revenues are lower than provinces and their financial capacity is further restricted by both a low population base and a federally imposed limit on the amount of borrowing a territorial government can do.