Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The comments were actually made to me, so I would accept the Minister’s apology too.

Just on the fibre optic line, if I can pick up where we left off there. Obviously it doesn’t need a road. If this project goes ahead, it will obviously soak up a lot of infrastructure dollars for, as we know, very little economic gain. I believe the 400 seasonal jobs for each of five years and, according to the economic study done by the department, 42 long-term jobs over 45 years. I don’t know if the tenure might be a long-term job. I’m not sure of the definition there.

With the loss of oil and gas jobs and so on, there’s no net gain there, especially compared to putting work into renewable energy projects. My concern is that this will, of course, shut down those renewable energy projects which offer real economic development and returns for the people of the region because the infrastructure dollars will be soaked up by this project. I guess, having heard the Minister’s dream, I just want to share my dream that someday this government will decide to actually invest in projects that are really designed to permanently enhance community economies and the future of our residents.

The Minister of Transportation at some point spoke of good intentions. I don’t question that. I think the intent is good here. I have to reiterate the comments of my colleague Ms. Bisaro that, very quickly, we are not speaking against the people because we don’t think they shouldn’t have anything. We are actually being forced to make decisions based on less than full information. We’ve had experience on what that can bring. My intent in raising these questions and comments is to actually do justice to our Beaufort-Delta residents and of working towards actually improving their lives and futures and their community economies, as I mentioned.

In summary, I guess, this project will clearly not provide the answers we want. It is simply doing the same thing harder, once again, with our fingers crossed and our eyes closed. I think there are enough sort of very large-scale challenges coming down the pipe at us that we’re aware of that we can’t afford to do this anymore. We have to be better, and we have to not look for the temporary short-term fix. We need to focus dollars such as these on ways of doing business that will actually meet the objectives that we want.

I would ask the Minister, just by way of a question, does the Minister expect that there will still be lots of money for renewable energy projects in this region, even if this project goes ahead and anticipating that it will certainly – almost guaranteed – be more expensive to both build and maintain?