Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm sure enjoying these two-hour question periods. I think we should amend the rules to do this every day.
My questions are for the Minister of the Housing Corporation, in follow-up to my Member's statements and some of the questions that I asked yesterday. I just want to say that, as a result of that, I have certainly received a lot of phone calls and input from different people. I was quite surprised to see the reaction. Yesterday when I was talking about some of the things that I thought the Housing Corporation could do better, I made a reference to the Novel housing project. I want to be very clear that what I was talking about was whether or not money had been clearly budgeted for the Novel housing project so that people could be taken to the plant and look at it, and all the kinds of explorations that need to be done to see if this is a good project or not, could be done. I thought it should have been a line item in a budget someplace so that we just don't have kind of an open-ended experiment or research being done that isn't well thought out and well planned. Having said that, though, I need to tell you that I have been to the plant, and I have toured it, and I have seen the Novel prototypes and, quite honestly, I've shared this with the Minister before, I think the concept is quite brilliant to build the conversion into the units, the camp units, at the plant level before they ever go into the field. It recycles, it reuses, it saves the proponents of the pipeline money in the end because there's residual value left there for them. It also provides this government with a legacy which could address housing shortages in the North. I want to say that I think it's quite a good idea and I didn't want it to come across that I was opposed to it.
What I want to ask the Minister now in follow-up to that is, are you able to see other benefits than what I have just listed off? I'm thinking of northern participation in the manufacturing. I'm thinking about tradespeople being trained as a result of this project. Maybe the Minister could elaborate on those kinds of benefits. Thank you.