Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm not exactly sure which program you're referring to. We have activity about northern communities, but it's in an area that I'm not responsible for.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Until this program it had been declining quite substantially. The Geological Survey really only had one field party out, about three years ago before the program was created. Now we have four major projects and probably about 15 small projects around the north. So there is a subs

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Just to add to that, it may not be quite right to say we are actually working together, but we are certainly exchanging information. We run a permafrost monitoring network to try to assess the state of permafrost in northern Canada. This information is shared, and it's part of th

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I can start. We've gone to the training societies and the colleges and have tried to outline the types of skills we would hire into the program for ourselves. They've been extremely responsive. We probably have more people than we can actually afford to hire in these things. On

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Up to 25% of the money can be shared with the provinces, but it's on a cost-sharing basis, and we haven't required the territories to do cost-sharing, because they have a different fiscal regime. Where we can get a collaboration with the provinces, this is all co-planned and co-d

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I can start on the geoscience part. Geoscience is really a forensic detective story. There are certain events in the earth's history that have concentrated energy and minerals, and our job is really to try to find the evidence that points to those events, so we integrate every

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, I do.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's an area that is in another group inside NRCan, and I wouldn't be able to speak on it.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Okay.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, this is information from Statistics Canada. They actually provide the breakdown by mineral resource. I don't have it with me, but I can certainly provide the table and information telling you which resources add up to how much is produced in each province. Absolutely.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We didn't actually estimate the state of mapping in each of the provinces, so there was no information included on this. Quebec actually has quite good geological information, and they have one of the better geological surveys in the entire country in that province. The fact it's

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Frozen methane is also known as gas hydrates. It's a poorly known resource, but it's basically methane trapped in permafrost ice crystals. It's known on the land and the sea floor. We've had an active program, particularly some work done in a place called Mallik in the Northwest

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Let me go to the very last slide and say that now we have completed 18 months of this program. We're getting quite a large amount of interest from industry and we're trying to connect with other organizations, such as HRSDC and INAC and the territorial governments as well, trying

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here today. I have a small presentation in powerpoint that I would like to distribute. My name is David Boerner. I'm a director general in the Geological Survey of Canada, which runs a number of programs related principally to the geolog

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Slide 3 shows a graph of the mineral production in Canada. Obviously Canada generates a very large amount of wealth from mineral and energy production. This slide shows a comparison of the mineral production in the provinces relative to the northern territories. You can immediate