Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, earlier today I began to sort of go over some of the information that is available through the Government of Canada. They had put out maps that show cellular coverage across highways across all of Canada, back in 2018. So there may have been some improvements but certainly not dramatic ones, that there's over 1,200 kilometres of highways that have no cellular coverage; 115,000 kilometres of roads in Canada that have no cellular coverage which, you know, that's not a good news story by any way and by any means, but just to say that it's not a problem that the Government of the Northwest Territories can solve alone. The federal government has been called on to support that, and the Universal Broadband Fund was available for that but that's, you know, a fund that had a defined scope and a defined budget to a certain degree. It's not going to solve all of these hundreds of thousands of kilometres of roads with no coverage, including ours. It would still be looking at what then the costs would be to the government.

For example, as I was discussing earlier today an estimate came back for just the stretch of road between here and the community of Behchoko, just that one hour's worth of driving would be upwards of $500,000 a year in O and M costs. So, Madam Chair, if this is going to be a priority of this Assembly, then that will have to be visited perhaps coming into the next Assembly because it certainly was not one of the priorities that we were mandated to and, as such, did not get priority funding under the capital plan. Thank you