Thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, the Member keeps calling this an error and he keeps trying to blame MTS and that's not the case.
As I did in my Member's statement, there are all types of events that happened that caused this problem. It all started off, as I said in the House the other day with my Minister's statement, that's why we are sitting here, was because of the high water that knocked all the buoys out, the delivery of fuel to the Hay River terminal that didn't meet spec that delayed the scheduling to all the communities again, and this multi-year sea ice that came down.
We worked very closely with Coast Guard. We are taking lessons learned from this. One of the things, I think, that strikes me the most already, and we are making plans that already address this, is our communications within our department of the MTS. We are committed to hiring another person that works closely with the communities on a case-by-case basis of people's freight.
I'm not going to sit here and take it, that saying this was an error of our department. This was a multitude of things that's a bad sea ice, non-spec fuel, high river conditions that knocked them way out. We are looking at the best we can to service these communities. We took the unprecedented event to fly everything in that we can. Those things are taking place as we speak. We have talked to every customer in every community. Paulatuk had 33 customers. We reached out and talked to every one of them. We have put people on the ground in each community to be able to unload and deliver people's freight as we continue to move forward. We have committed to getting the fuel in there.
The one thing that we are not going to do and we are going to take the unprecedented step is we are not going to herc the vehicles in. We are going to, as a department, we are looking at rebating all the customers for their freight for their vehicles for the next coming season. Thank you, Mr. Chair.