Mr. Speaker, today I rise to address a sadly reoccurring issue: disruptions to our digital connectivity. Since the beginning of 2019, we have dealt with three roughly day-long service interruptions; May the 8^th, July 13^th, and yesterday, August 12^th. I must acknowledge that the incidents are still under investigation by the RCMP, and I trust that they will do their utmost while investigating these matters.

However, I am concerned about the bigger issues these incidents have brought to the forefront of our attention. Every time we have an outage of this severity, it first and foremost affects our businesses. Transacting any form of electronic payment becomes unreliable or impossible. As the mayor of Yellowknife said yesterday, "It's not just, 'Oh shoot, Facebook is down.' It's people's livelihoods. We need something more reliable." Point-of-sale devices, business and government operations, emergency contact numbers, just to name a few, were all affected by this outage.

Connectivity in the North and other rural areas of Canada has been a hot topic for years. I wonder what steps the GNWT, Ottawa, Northwestel, and other potential governments and service providers have and are considering as a solution to not only secure our tech infrastructure, but also what plans have been explored concerning the building of redundancy measures with greater bandwidth than currently exists.

We know that the bandwidth of the existing redundancy measures is nowhere near sufficient to handle the average daily throughput we need here in the North. This is a problem which must be addressed by the existing service provider with joint effort from the GNWT, Ottawa, and other industry partners alike. Infrastructure protection is a tough topic in Canada, and especially in the North, as we have such vast expanses through which to protect our physical infrastructure. It should be noted that it is incredibly difficult to protect individual assets from malicious damage.

If we wish to overcome this over the next few years and diversify towards a true knowledge-based economy, then we must have quality digital infrastructure and uninterrupted connectivity, with sufficient redundancy in place to ensure that. We have to increase remote learning opportunities and truly build a North that can access the full breadth of information that is out there.

I will have further questions later today for the Minister responsible for our telecoms in the Northwest Territories. Hopefully, he can shed some light on what we are doing to improve our quality of service in the NWT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.