Thank you, Speaker-elect. The effects and impacts of climate change on the Northwest Territories are very troublesome and have had a serious impact on almost every aspect of our lives. Here in Yellowknife, for example, we've had low water problems. We've had extensive fires across the Northwest Territories. I've been to Tuktoyaktuk to see the soil erosion. I grew up on the Mackenzie River and you can definitely see the serious impact of climate change on the rivers of the Northwest Territories.
The clear trends in the Northwest Territories are that the temperatures are rising. We've experienced it here for the past two or three months. What we need is to find a way. There's just been a very significant Climate Change Protocol that's been negotiated in Paris at COP21, and it's very important for us to learn and understand what the provisions are. I know that some significant funds have been provided for, to deal with climate change. I think that some of the disaster funding should be looked at, to see what can be made available to deal with soil erosion in Tuktoyaktuk, for example. We've met with the mayor and council. They do have funding that has been identified in the capital budget, as far as the capital budget of the community. They are working on developing a plan. When I used to be at MACA, we used to haul several million dollars' worth of gravel into Tuktoyaktuk, only to see it washed away with some of the serious storms that are getting more and more drastic because of the fact that the sea ice is now open much longer in the Beaufort Sea. They used to have open water for four and a half weeks a year. Now the open water is, like, 15 weeks a year, so they're much more prone to very large storms.
In every area, certainly we can't afford to be paying $28 million every year to deal with low-water surcharges because there isn't enough water in our hydro reservoirs in both the Snare and Bluefish. The same with forest fires. We can't afford to pay $50 million a year to fight forest fires so our communities don't burn down. Of course, we live in a permafrost area. Thawing permafrost is another big problem. It affects our transportation infrastructure; it affects our water quality. We also just saw one of the lakes in your riding drain and collapse and wash away. So we need to adapt to the effects of climate change, especially in the transportation system as well. We need to improve surface and drainage conditions on highways. We've seen pictures of how it's affecting our highways. You just have to drive from here to Behchoko and see how it is affecting our highways, and our airport runways, realigning winter roads to overland rights-of-way, adapting ice bridge building technologies to extend ferry service operations, and we need to build permanent bridges to extend and stabilize the winter road season. So, there are a lot of areas where climate change is affecting us. That's not even talking about how it's affecting wildlife, how it's affecting fish and so on. So, it's a very big area and it's getting bigger every year. It's affecting us more and more, so we will have to work not only here in the Northwest Territories as individuals but we have to work with other governments nationally and internationally, and other groups that are doing very well in educating people about climate change.