Natural Resources committee  Fort Chipewyan. This is news to me as well. We had a letter that came in very recently indicating that funding would be discontinued. We have 1,300 residents or so up in the region, with lots of activity back and forth. Again, these are participants in the oil sands economy as well.

Natural Resources committee  No. What I will say is that we have secured $2.4 billion in road works, in health care expansion, in child day care. We've had wage supplements from several years back now. The municipality received $103 million for expanding water and waste water treatment capacity. When you tally up all of these things, the bridges and the overpasses, they would have been a provincial responsibility anyway, but they've finally come to the table and made those investments.

Natural Resources committee  Let me be clear that there have been contributions. I think $150 million was recently allocated for the road works, in concert with the province. We have seen some, but in many cases the municipality's side of the balance sheet just isn't eligible for some of that. It usually will funnel through the province, and that's where I go back to the census.

Natural Resources committee  No, this is a new idea just for the script that we created for your standing committee. But I think it is something that would be well served by both the federal and the provincial government. Indeed, an on-the-ground facility residing in the municipality would draw in the independent monitoring and give the people in the community an opportunity to interface directly with it.

Natural Resources committee  The first one that I'll address is the expansion. We are moving to a terminal that should be able to accommodate 1.2 million passenger movements through the year. We're already exceeding by far the capacity of the current one. The airport authority's premise in thinking about the opportunity for three-way funding is that the authority and the municipality would come up with $50 million for the project and try to leverage that against similar contributions of $50 million from the provincial and federal government.

Natural Resources committee  We are a region that's vast in size, but we have five first nations included within our boundaries. The reserves are affected differently, based on their proximity to the oil industry. If you look to the one closest to the heart of the oil sands development, Fort McKay, they have transitioned from probably more of a traditional living to one that embraces the economic opportunities.

Natural Resources committee  Every opportunity is available, from your social service workers, which seems to have an appeal.... You've got just such a variety of opportunity, but, again, when the companies empower aboriginal people to create companies that bring on more of the folks from their own areas, I think it benefits everyone for sure.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for inviting me to address your committee on natural resources regarding development in the north. Alberta has the third largest reserve of oil in the world, and the vast majority of that is found within my municipality. My region is large.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. I believe it is, and that's an issue that fell from our 2002 business case. We actually did a lot of work on it. I'm sure we considered Vancouver and Winnipeg, and I thought there was one in Saskatchewan that existed as well. It was on the foundation of that that we thought we would create a memorandum of understanding that would be beneficial to the inclusion of federal, municipal, and provincial sharing of project costs on a strategic basis.

Natural Resources committee  I do not. There are very nominal fees that are applicable for the development process, but they're related to the....

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely, and there are two recommendations I would make. Municipal Affairs has been a key contact for us in trying to advance some of the things we've talked about, from changes to the Municipal Government Act right down to comparisons between the infrastructure in our community and in other communities of our size.

Natural Resources committee  I would start. Only because the regional council has given us a mandate to intervene in project applications as they come forward and had given due consideration to what we believed was appropriate for our region—trying to take into perspective all of those interests, including the business interests and development pace that we're facing—we've been very careful not to use the word “moratorium”.

Natural Resources committee  Land is another thing that has not kept pace with development. The province is the majority landholder in our region, and the municipality has nothing to offer in the way of developments for people. I'm not sure if there's much federal ownership there, but part of the exacerbating factor....

Natural Resources committee  Mike started to touch on it. We struck a deal in 1996 that was intended to bring additional oil sands development. The regime was established to entice businesses into the marketplace. That gives us the royalty structure that currently exists. The projection at the time of the signing was $25 billion over 25 years.

Natural Resources committee  A conspiracy of events led to underprojections, and that's the data we've used. Our municipal development plan anticipated 52,000 people in Fort McMurray. That happened two years ago, so we had a 20-year plan that expired quite rapidly. The series of events Mike described, where the price per barrel of oil became that much more of a catalyst for development in the region and the general free market that existed enticed an awful lot more activity in the oil sands....