Thank you, Madam Chair. First, I just want to say I do agree with me colleague about looking ahead and being proactive on operations costs when we are making our infrastructure and capital plans.

I want to say that I'm actually pleased to see a large infrastructure investment going forward. One thing when economies are bad, that governments do, is they build infrastructure. It's a way that we can keep people in the Northwest Territories employed over the next while as COVID really does make our future quite uncertain, particularly our economic future going forward.

Another piece that keeps striking me is that the cost of building houses is only going to escalate and is escalating currently due to the lack of supplies, etcetera. Not having roads only creates more expense for our territory to build houses. So if we have the roads to move the materials around easier, it will be easier for us to build houses in the long run. So I think I don't have a lot of optimism sitting here two years in where we're at with our housing and whether or not we are going to achieve that priority. Therefore, second to that, I would say invest in the roads. We have a lot of construction companies in the North. We have a lot of labourers and skilled labourers that work on road and apprentices. To me, this is the way we can make it through the COVID economic downturn.

And having just come back from the climate change conference, I don't have a lot of -- having been an ice engineer on the ice road, I don't have a lot of faith that we're going to be building ice roads going forward. So to me, investing in roads right now is smart.

We often just heard it yesterday, or the other day, the time to have built the ice road -- or sorry, the road to the diamond mines was 20 years ago. So do we want to be sitting in 20 more years with no ice roads saying where we should have built roads 20 years ago.

So more of a comment than a question, Madam Chair. But I would like to say that I think this is the only way we can move forward in the next while. Thank you.