Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In my Members' statement I stated to this House that the communities of Chesterfield Inlet, Repulse Bay, Baker Lake and Clyde River have a chronic snow removal problem. I will specifically talk about Repulse Bay and Chesterfield because they are in my riding.
Some of it is due to a poor town plan design, respecting the prevailing winds. Of course, there is the natural habit of snowstorms in those two communities. They are so frequent that those communities, with D-6 equipment, cannot keep up with the snow removal on roads, especially to the school and to the lake.
Both of those communities have requested, through their five-year capital plan and also through the individual letters to MACA -- for instance, Chesterfield Inlet wants a 966 model payloader, and Repulse Bay requested a D-8. I was advised that the government policy requires a special consideration for the community if there is to be D-8 equipment of that size.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to inform the Minister that in respect to equipment, you cannot really place the size of a community in relation to equipment, because the problem is not the size of the community, whether is small or big; the problem is with snow. The snow -- I guess in the Western Arctic they call it ice -- to use it is snow, because it is so packed hard that regular four-wheel vehicles can actually ride on that snow. It is so hard that the D-6s are not strong enough, and they are not big enough to keep up with the clearing of the roads, especially the banks. They call them the banks, I guess, because most of them are the height of this building. It is rather dangerous, because once you get on that road, especially when you are walking, there is no way for you to get out of the road until you get to your destination. There is no way to climb that, to get away from the other vehicles. I would like to ask the Minister if he will be advising those two communities that I am talking about, that there is to be a review of the type of equipment that is needed for those two communities in the near future, because there is a capital budget for retrofitting of D-6 for $75,000, but that chronic problem is not going to be eliminated just by having a retrofit of that D-6 equipment. I would like to have the Minister actually dig into the situation and determine what the real problem is, not from the philosophical or hypothetical standpoints of the size the community requires of that kind of vehicle, but look at what is really needed for those two communities individually. Then we will probably start to have the problem solved. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.