Mr. Speaker, without a customer at the other end, the project itself from a government perspective is unviable unless we are to get a huge influx of cash from the federal government or if we at this Assembly were to say take a portion of the dollars and put it purely towards this project.

This business case has been built on a customer; a number of customers in the sense of the mines. Future development, for example, and the Member has raised this issue of Avalon going forward, is important for us and looking to the future, but until we know if they’re actually going to make a decision to proceed, we have to weigh that with the fact that we know there’s a customer in place now.

The potential for our hydro development is to sell that power to a southern customer base is another option, but without a grid from southern Canada up here, again that is not economical for us. The future can spell that out for us and we have to keep those open. That is why I have directed and had our staff looking at having discussions between the Minister of ITI and companies like Avalon as well.