Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There was an earlier question about whether or not the department was proceeding with any privatization without coming back to the Infrastructure committee, for example, to talk it over. The answer that we gave is we aren't doing that. The Iqaluit situation is one where we don't have responsibility for that until September 1996. The federal government is currently handling it through an arrangement with Shell. We didn't consider it privatization to find a way to avoid taking on one more responsibility that we felt the private sector could handle. So when the question was asked about whether we were privatizing it, we didn't consider this privatizing of an existing government operation. It was avoiding taking on more responsibility for something the private sector could do. This is no different than a situation that we have in Inuvik, Hay River or Yellowknife where the community is large enough for the private sector to do this work outside of government.

So we did this to get a better price and it looks, with this longer-term contract, like we are going to be getting some significant returns and going to avoid taking on more responsibility at a time when we are trying to encourage the private sector growth.