Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am not up-to-date on the specifics of that road. I am aware of it. I am aware of the community's needs. As I said earlier there is money available to assist in community access. These funds are available to assist a community to put a road out to an area that would be deemed hunting or fishing and that would benefit the community. It is not an entirely government funded program. The community is required to contribute. I am not sure whether it would be in time or money, but somehow they are expected to make contributions. The Department of Transportation does make contributions under its Community Access Program.
There are a number of requests which have come forward and I am keenly aware of them. I hear what the Members are saying about Arctic communities which do not have major highways and how important roads to hunting and fishing areas are. In our discussions with department officials we are going to be collecting all of these requests. There is a limited amount of money involved and I would imagine that we would have to set certain priorities and some timetables on assisting communities. We need not only a verbal request, but written materials, a proposal, put forward by the community to advise the department on how this is to be accomplished.
I think we would be available to assist in any way that we can. We will not do anything until we get a letter. There are a lot of requests and we need to have some specifics and I think we stack them up against other needs. We are very keenly aware of the needs of this program and wish we had more money in it to account for all of the requests. Yes, we certainly will be able to review all of these requests for community access roads.