Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to follow up on my colleague Mr. Yakeleya’s questions. I see our water use fee is $80,000. That’s incredibly low, given the use of this public resource. As Mr. Yakeleya said, 10 billion litres of water at Norman Wells by Imperial Esso. We know, in fact, that that will be put to shame, in terms of the amount, very quickly by the activity with fracking, which is a very, very intensive water use.
Letting industry use these resources at this rate is an incredible subsidy. It’s an environmental subsidy, but it’s much costlier than some; for example, $15 million in the development strategy is pale compared to this subsidy. It’s more along the lines of the hundreds of millions that we are subsidizing with infrastructure.
The big concern here is that in many cases this is permanent loss with fracking. The water is permanently removed from the ecosystem and stored underground forever or returned in a polluted state to the ecosystem. We know that the North has very limited renewable water.
Will we expect to see some recognition of this, now that we have some authority here, in the water use fees? Thank you.