Thank you, Madam Chair. I do not know how else to explain that. I do not think that if the Member does not understand what I am saying now, then he will never get it. I have tried to explain in question period the other day and tonight in the Minister's statement that we are very
confident of the cost savings, very significant cost savings. Maybe I could just summarize once again.
During the time that we were examining the whole Keewatin resupply program, and this was as a result of the threat of the port of Churchill closing and the rail line shutting down, we found out that it presently costs the shipping company 20 cents to ship a litre of fuel into the Keewatin, on average. At the time they were asked for a quote on how much it would cost them if they went through direct resupply, and that is from an eastern port directly to the communities. Right now it costs 23 cents, at the time they told us if they did direct resupply it would cost 5.6 cents a litre. If you multiply that by the 30 million litres a year that are used in the Keewatin, it does not take a lot of math to figure out these are more than significant savings that we cannot afford to ignore. That is exactly what I have done. I am not ignoring them. As I said the issues have been brought up as concerns in the communities I will be dealing with.
I am going to a meeting in six days in Arviat, with the hamlet, hosted by the deputy mayor, Mr. King I believe, to discuss their two main issues. One is the environmental aspect which is the location of the pipeline, and that I am very confident that we can fix. We can deal with that. The other issue they have is the lack of frequency of deliveries when we go to the freighter system. This is probably a bit more difficult to answer. It is a system used by the rest of the eastern Arctic at present, by the rest of Baffin Island and the northern parts of the Keewatin, and I think the way that we can try to work around that, is to make sure that people are well aware of deadlines, they have easy procedures to use when they are making arrangements for shipping, et cetera. I guess in a sense it amazes me to hear the Member spends so much time talking about the lack of spending or capital in his region in effect, rejecting $7 million worth of capital work that we are proposing to do this through the pipeline. I do not get it. I do not understand that, but that is the best I can explain.
In terms of how are we going to inform potential proponents, we have advertised in the Kivalliq News newspaper recently and we will be holding a pre-proposal conference on November 4, 1997, there we will be discussing the projects with those parties who may be interested in the project and would like to seek advice on technical matters and explore how the project may impact on future fuel supply and delivery contracts in that region. That is how we are dealing with that.