Thank you very much.
I come from a riding that's the size of France, and I have 22 first nations that live in isolation. They don't have roads. I'm very interested in this whole concept of what's beneficial, what we used to call, years ago, “nation-building”. Diefenbaker used to call it “roads to resources”. There was an understanding that to build this nation, the federal government had to be directly involved.
About three weeks ago, our government put $1.6 billion into my riding to connect 17 first nations to the power grid. It's fair to say that would never have been done by the private sector, generally, nor would the building of the Trans-Canada Highway, or the roads to resources in northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan. None of that would have been done.
Why do you think the Government of Canada has gotten away from nation-building as part of the infrastructure development? Is it a fear that somehow we'll be influencing, or that it will be interpreted as the government being involved in, the jurisdictions of the provinces or municipalities? This country is still underdeveloped. If you drive across the nation, as I have a couple of times now, it's totally underdeveloped. It's built in little pieces along the U.S.-Canada border.
We've got a long way to go, and we can be a lot more productive, for sure. I'm just curious as to your analysis of the short term versus the long term, plus our insistence on little municipal projects when there's a lot of nation-building to do.