As others have commented, the bigger backbone that's going to be laid—a fibre optic cable up the coast that's cost-shared between the federal and provincial governments—is terrific. That's absolutely necessary. However, when it comes to shore—and it will link all of our communities to that—the problem becomes what happens for the last mile. The funding for that is quite confused, and what is available tends to be snapped up by the private sector. Sadly, the smart operators are just using government funding and saving their own for other things. Also, as I said earlier, for the nations, and particularly the smaller ones, it becomes a competitive process. They work against each other rather than together to get a proper last-mile connection.
What you further asked about is the second part of this. Even if you get the connection, if you don't have people trained up in the capacity to utilize and maximize, it's a tool that's suboptimally used. We do need funding support to make sure that people are trained and prepared. Again, it's not just a matter of throwing out a few bucks and saying we'll put them in a university course. That's not the way it works. Everybody knows that for first nation communities to come out of the dark period of time in our history, it's about more than that.
We're prepared as CFN to work with our member Nuxalk and others to get that kind of training and capacity, but we need support.