I'd like to begin our 20th meeting of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study of northern territories and economic development, specifically the barriers and solutions for the same.
We're delighted today to welcome three witnesses, and I'll get to that in a moment.
Members will know that we have scheduled votes today in the House at 5:30 p.m., so the bells will sound at 5:15 p.m., assuming everything stays on schedule. We'll try to gear our schedule around that, with the likely adjournment of the meeting at or about 5:15 p.m.
Two of our guests today are joining us by video conference, and we're awaiting one of our other witnesses. I think we'll begin with our guest who is here with us in Ottawa, Mr. Robert Reid, the president of the Mackenzie Valley Aboriginal Pipeline LP. Of course, he's here on a topic that is extremely pertinent to our study and interest in economic development in the north, so let's open up.
Mr. Reid, we normally have a 10-minute presentation by each of the witnesses. For the benefit of Mr. Quin, who is joining us here as well, you have up to 10 minutes each for the opening presentation. We'll do each of those in sequence, after which we will proceed to questions from members.
Let's begin with Mr. Reid.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and
bonjour, mesdames et monsieurs.
I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you this afternoon. The clerk has circulated a handout that I hope all of you have in your possession. I'm just going to go through that quickly; I'm not going to go through it in detail.
This afternoon I'll provide you with a high-level overview of the Mackenzie gas project, and then I'll focus on the Aboriginal Pipeline Group and the role we're playing in making this important project a reality.
The Mackenzie gas project accesses the closest frontier natural gas basin in North America. There are 6 trillion cubic feet of onshore natural gas reserves, and onshore these days is important. The project, as it stands, does not access offshore resources. It will have an initial capacity of 1.2 billion cubic feet per day, expandable to 1.8 billion cubic feet a day through the addition of compressor units. The total project cost is $16.2 billion. The Aboriginal Pipeline Group is a partner in the natural gas pipeline portion of the project only, and that amounts to $7.8 billion.
The original proposal to develop the Mackenzie Delta Basin dates back to the early 1970s. Public hearings were held under Justice Berger, and I understand he is going to be joining us this afternoon. The aboriginal groups at that time were unanimously opposed to the construction of the pipeline. The main reason behind this was that there were no land claims in place at that time.
In 1977 Justice Berger declared a 10-year moratorium on development. The aboriginal communities were simply not ready to capture the benefits that would have been available to them from a project of this magnitude. That decision was quite controversial at the time, but history has shown it to be a wise decision indeed.
During the 1980s and 1990s, three of the four aboriginal groups along the pipeline right-of-way settled their land claims. In January of 2000, before an application to build this pipeline had been filed, the aboriginal leaders of the Mackenzie Valley got together and reached agreement on a vision, and that was to maximize aboriginal ownership and benefits from a Mackenzie Valley pipeline. The Aboriginal Pipeline Group is the result of that vision. Today the project has strong aboriginal alignment and support all along its right-of-way. The Berger era is over.
APG is a unique alignment of the aboriginal groups in the Mackenzie Valley, not only to support the construction of the pipeline but to be a part of it. APG is a business deal negotiated by aboriginal people for aboriginal people. Our mandate is to maximize the long-term financial return to the aboriginal groups of the Northwest Territories through ownership in the pipeline. We've negotiated the right to secure a one-third interest in this pipeline. Our shareholders are the Gwich’in Tribal Council, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, and the Sahtu Pipeline Trust.
I'll introduce our board at the end of this presentation.
As for ownership of the Mackenzie gas project, Imperial Oil is the largest partner, at 34%; APG is the second largest partner, at one-third, or 33%; and then ConocoPhillips Canada, Shell Canada, and Exxon Mobil Canada make up the balance.
As a full partner, we have a seat on the board of the Mackenzie gas project. We participate in all committees and subcommittees, and in this way we have a direct voice in how this major project will be developed. We bring the concerns from the communities right to the board table.
The next slide in the package outlines the regulatory timeline. I won't go through it in detail, other than to say that the application was originally filed in October 2004. Public hearings commenced in January 2006. The NEB sat adjourned for three years, waiting for the joint review panel to produce their report, which they did last December. The NEB is moving toward a decision this fall. APG will continue to support the regulatory process through to the NEB decision. We're in the final stages of restructuring the project to make it a true basin-opening pipeline that will attract incremental shippers and have attractive tolls and tariffs. After that we'll begin detailed engineering, finalize the route alignment, and then there is the small matter of obtaining 7,000 local permits from the local land and water boards.
The next slide shows the timeline. All I'll say on that is if we get a decision this fall, construction will commence in the fall of 2016 and it will take place over three winter seasons. This pipeline will be built 100% in the wintertime, because the tundra cannot support heavy equipment during the summer months and you create less environmental impact during winter construction. We'll see the first gas flow in 2018.
There are very significant benefits to the Mackenzie Valley through the implementation of this project. First of all, there's a socio-economic impact fund of $500 million that has been negotiated by the aboriginal groups with the federal government. There's $1 billion in set-aside work for corridor groups. That's work under the access and benefits agreements that has been guaranteed to go to local contractors.
There are business and employment opportunities in the Northwest Territories for 7,000 jobs during construction and over 100,000 jobs across Canada, with approximately 150 permanent full-time positions. This project is not only good for the north, it's good for Canada as a whole.
This slide shows the gross domestic product benefits of over $100 billion and tax and royalty revenue of over $10 billion to the various governments.
The final slide shows our board of directors. I'm proud to report to a board of directors who are all aboriginal. They're a fantastic group of people to work for.
Thank you very much.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm relieved by your introduction. When the previous speaker said the Berger era is over, I thought, well, it had a good run, 30 years or more.
I'm also relieved to know the topic is the general one of economic development in the north. For a moment there I thought it was a reprise of the whole Mackenzie Valley issue, which is now in other hands, and no doubt very competent hands.
Maybe I could just tell you that I did spend three years in the Mackenzie Valley, in the western Arctic, back in the late seventies, and I think I learned something about the north and economic development. I did emphasize in my report the importance of maintaining the traditional economy of hunting, fishing, and trapping, which was then, and I believe is today, an important component of northern culture and putting food on the table. That tends to be overlooked in the enthusiasm for industrial projects. Part of the reason I emphasized it 30 years ago was to ensure that the measures were taken in land claims agreements to secure those hunting, fishing, and trapping rights. That was a precondition to industrial development.
I was in Nunavut in 2005 and 2006 as conciliator between Canada, Nunavut, and the ITC, the Inuit corporation that represents the beneficiaries. Could I just leave you with a few thoughts that I expressed in my report in March 1, 2006, about development in the north, with particular attention to Nunavut so that nobody will think I'm giving any firm opinions about the Mackenzie Valley or development there?
In Nunavut I was of course dealing with the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement of 1993, which established the Government of Nunavut in 1999. The concern was, now you've got the land claims settled, you've got your own government, what about the next steps? Of course, my concern was that there should be measures taken to ensure that the Inuit, in that case--but the principle would apply generally throughout the north to the aboriginal peoples--inhabited their own government, so to speak, and that they had opportunities for employment on development as it occurred in the north. Of course, in Nunavut you're faced with the overlying issue, so to speak, of global warming and the melting of the ice, and the greater access this offers, I think, to industry in Nunavut. It makes mines and minerals and oil and gas that much more accessible. The question is this. How do the Inuit people become participants? How do they become miners, how do they become biologists, and how do they become members of all the trained occupations and professions that are essential if they are to occupy 50% of the jobs in their own government that they don't possess now because they don't have the qualifications? The same will be reproduced in the private sector as it moves into the north and onto the Arctic islands, as they begin searching for minerals and oil and gas under the seabed.
That means that education and employment have to be the concerns that are uppermost in the north for aboriginal people. People who are non-aboriginal will be coming in to fill many of these jobs, and they are already qualified. What concerns me is the qualification of aboriginal people. I made recommendations that had mainly to do with education in Nunavut, because with 75% of Inuit children dropping out of school before they complete high school.... The figures are better in the western Arctic, but they are still figures that should make us distinctly uneasy. We want to make sure that Inuit will be able to get those jobs. Even working for their own corporations, even working in oil or gas, in mining partnerships that their land claims agreements have now made possible for them, how are they to get the jobs for which you need to be qualified?
I don't want to make too much of this, and I'm sure you're aware of that concern. I made the point in my report, which I have here, that you need a true system of bilingual education in Nunavut. Right now they educate in Inuktitut until about grade 4 or 5, and then they switch to English. It means that their education is in two segments, if you will, and they emerge not really literate in either their own language, which is a written language, or in English, which is the primary language of most people--other than Inuktitut.
I urged that the federal government subsidize that program, because it would be expensive. We'd have to train more teachers, mainly Inuit teachers. We would have to have the programs that have worked in other jurisdictions for children to learn their own language after school from older people. This is because 75% of the people of Nunavut still speak Inuktitut as their first language. These kids ought to have the opportunity to become literate in the language that is spoken in their homes and is the aboriginal language in Canada that is spoken by the largest body of aboriginal people. It's not going to go away. If you consider that, and I hope you do, bilingual education.... I urged at the time, in 2006, that we could graduate the first classes in 2020, and those people would be equipped to go on to vocational training. They would be equipped to go on to college or university, and they would be able to take their place in their own government--as people in charge of the wildlife of this vast area, as people who would be able to enter the private sector as geologists or engineers. That has to be our goal, because otherwise, the industrial development of these northern territories may once again occur with aboriginal people being, in many cases, bystanders, or working in the catering division or as janitors and so on. We don't want to see that.
They've had 30 years to consider how to integrate aboriginal people into the Mackenzie gas project. The same possibilities don't currently exist to integrate the Inuit people into projects that are already on the drawing board for Nunavut, and they won't exist unless we establish an appropriate system of education that equips them for the training they will need in the Arctic in the years to come.
I'm grateful to you for giving me 10 minutes, and I'm afraid that's all I've got to say.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, members, for the opportunity to talk to you about this issue. I did circulate a presentation, as the chair mentioned, that has been sent around to you, I believe. What I thought I'd do is touch on the major points that were in that summary.
First, my background is that I've been working on major mining projects in the Canadian north since 1993. I've worked on major projects in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon, so perhaps I'm somewhat unique from that perspective. I've worked in all three territories on major mining projects and have had quite a bit of exposure to the regulatory environment, economic development there, both successfully and unsuccessfully, over those years.
To set the scene, the economic potential of the north is tremendous. There is a huge amount of natural resource opportunity, which is well-known from the past, but new discoveries have been made, such as diamond mines. And 20 or 25 years ago people would have laughed to hear of diamonds in Canada. Now they're some of the largest mines in the world. There are gold projects, such as I was involved in at Hope Bay, which is one of Canada's largest resources anywhere. Only last year, a discovery was made by a company called Underworld, in the Yukon.
All of these are new things that are coming out. So it's not only what is known, like the gas in Mackenzie Valley, but there are new discoveries that have been made over the last 20 years that are really simply demonstrating the barely tapped potential of the north.
The big question is, why is so little happening up there? Why have there been so few mines developed in the Canadian north, given what is known in natural resources, and also the obvious potential, to go and find world-class deposits with relatively short timeframes to development? Essentially, I would argue that it's the regulatory regime that is extremely complex and burdensome, extremely expensive, and very, very uncertain. When mining companies and other resource companies look around the world, they look at where they can get things done, how long it will take, and how much it will cost. The bottom line is that they'll go somewhere else when it's too challenging, so the money flows to other locations.
I mentioned the Fraser Institute survey on regulatory competitiveness that goes out annually. As I said in the letter, some people might not like the Fraser Institute politically, but the bottom line is that the survey is simply a survey of over 300 senior mining executives. It compiles their feelings in a survey ranking all different aspects of regulatory competitiveness. Yukon came 11th, Nunavut came 43rd, and Northwest Territories came 50th out of 72 jurisdictions surveyed around the world, which is a pretty dismal showing, apart from Yukon—not quite in the top ten, just one below that. Essentially, I would agree with that. Having worked there, I wouldn't argue with those rankings. Relatively or absolutely, those are appropriate.
So what's the problem? It's essentially the regulatory environment that is a huge disincentive to spending the time to go and find deposits, and then seeing the challenges of trying to develop a mine and advance it to production, to the point where companies say if it is going to take three, four, five times as long, they might as well go do it somewhere else because they can get it done more readily. That doesn't mean standards are lower anywhere else—they're just as tough, just as strict on standards—it's simply the process to get through that is such a challenge.
The experience in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut...I gave a couple of examples in my presentation, but the simple one is we were trying to permit a tiny mine, what would have been Canada's smallest mine, 600 tonnes a day. It would have cost $70 million and it would have lasted for two years. We spent over six years--I think it was six and a half years--and $20 million trying to get that mine permitted. It was a hugely burdensome process that goes to demonstrate the impracticality and unreasonableness of that process and why companies give up and go somewhere else. That was in Nunavut.
In the Northwest Territories I gave the example of our Con Mine. We bought it in 1993, about six years after a draft closure plan was completed. It took another 13 years for that plan to be approved. It was a 20-year process to get a closure plan approved for an operating mine. You know, it's just an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to get through those kinds of processes. Of course, the challenge for a company is that you don't know what your liabilities are until that process is completed, because you don't know what standards or requirements you're going to be held to. So you just look at it and say the uncertainty is too great and I'm not going to bother; I'll go somewhere else.
What are the major things that need fixing? A significant issue that applies to the Northwest Territories and Nunavut is the fact that a lot of approvals during the process have to go to the minister of INAC for sign-off, and that process often ends up in delays of three, six, or nine months. I've seen delays as long as two or three years, simply waiting for the minister to sign off on a process that has already been completed and recommended by his own ministry. Obviously, it gets to the bottom of the pile and it's not a priority, so it doesn't happen. That extends the regulatory process for substantial amounts of time.
On the duplicative processes, for example, DIAND or INAC runs a process in Nunavut in our Hope Bay project, but it runs a parallel process in Ottawa for the minister to be able to sign off. So you have one ministry running two processes, let alone all the other ministries and governments running their processes. It's just a huge waste of time, money, and process for everybody.
Response times, particularly by federal regulators, are extremely slow. They will always ask for more extensions on timelines. Then usually--and I've had this experience personally on several occasions--they'll show up with 70 pages of comments the night before a meeting that's been set up months in advance, and the process the next day is just pointless because you can't answer the 70 pages of questions. They've had months to provide those questions in advance to give the company an opportunity to deal with them. What you often have, for example, in those 70-page questions and comments is a request for a huge amount of information that wasn't originally contemplated in the applications. You provide that information, which can often take months or even years to generate, and that just leads to more and more questions. So you end up in this never-ending loop of information requests that can take a simple document.... For example, our water management plan for the Hope Bay project went from about 100 pages to I think 2,000 pages by the time it was completed, in multiple iterations of aspects from regulators.
I don't think it really added anything to the equation in the end, but it ties into another component, which is the consultants that everybody hires. We go through a regulatory process. We have our consultants. The federal regulators have their consultants, usually one each. The first nations will have their consultants. You can end up with six, seven, or eight different sets of consultants in the room, and everybody's just asking each other questions and arguing about who's the better expert on whatever aspect it's going to be. The net result is there's no incentive for the consultants to see the process completed, because the more questions they ask, the more they get information provided, which gives them more time to review and more billings for everybody. So it just ends up an extremely inefficient process that drags on and on, and it takes huge amounts of time to add virtually no value to the whole equation.
A similar aspect is the morphing of review processes into regulatory processes. Each territory has an environmental assessment process, such as NIRB in Nunavut, Mackenzie Valley in the Northwest Territories, and YESAA in the Yukon. Those processes have essentially morphed into where they're essentially doing the regulator's job, but then they get to the end and they provide their recommendations to the regulator. The regulator is the one that has the legal responsibility plus the expertise to actually regulate whatever process it happens to be: discharging water, building tailings dams, whatever it happens to be. The net result is that often the review process is in conflict with the regulator's own opinion, but the regulator is now hamstrung, because if he disagrees with the review process it has to go right back to the beginning and start all over again.
So you end up with an overlap that creates this box. It has just happened to a project in Yukon, for example. A project is now trapped between a review process that has been deemed adequate and complete and a regulatory process that disagrees. The net result is that unless it's resolved, it will be kicked back to the beginning.
My last point is really on--
:
Excuse me just for a second. We are at the 10-minute point.
I see, Mr. Quin, that you have summarized some of your key recommendations. Perhaps in the course of questions you can speak to some of them, and I'm sure you'll have the opportunity to do that. Even if you don't, we have them here in print.
We're up against a vote timeline today at about 5:15, so at this point I would like to move to questions from members. We'll give you sufficient time to comment on those recommendations.
[Translation]
Mr. Reid, there will be questions in French.
[English]
So you'll need your audio piece in and working.
For our witnesses, Mr. Quin and former Justice Berger, I think the translation will come over the audio.
[Translation]
Mr. Bagnell, you have the floor for seven minutes.
:
Thank you very much. And thank you for the written submissions.
To Mr. Berger, I did read the The Nunavut Project report, which was published in 2006, in March, I believe.
I have a question related to something you said, which was that the government, in your opinion, was opposed to the financing of education in Inuktitut. I'm sorry, but I'm going to take issue with you on that, because I think we're talking about a jurisdictional issue here on K to 12.
Your recommendations suggested that an investment of about $20 million annually would accomplish the objectives. We have certainly increased transfers to the Nunavut government by a much greater number than that since 2006. They have choices to make. We have never indicated that, to my knowledge, and they've had every opportunity to make an appropriate choice.
I didn't want to leave that sort of hanging out there. I don't know if you have anything to add to that.
I think the potential for economic development is there and the impetus for economic development will make itself felt. I think there will be economic development. My concern is that the progress of the aboriginal people, their capacity to participate in that development, should be given as much importance as anything else.
Let me say that the people in the education department in Nunavut have been, for some years now, developing a written curriculum of materials in Inuktitut. Their people have always, and certainly in recent years, been eager to carry out the recommendations I made, which were by and large a reflection of the thinking in Nunavut anyway.
I don't know what the figures are at the moment, but I think 90% of Nunavut's budget comes from Ottawa. The problem is, they have many needs. There is the need to take a good look at their system of education, which isn't working well--we have to concede that. But to implement the type of system that they themselves want can only be done with wholehearted federal support. I'm not blaming the government. I mean, this insistence on subsidizing only English and French has been a policy of the federal government for a long time now.
I just don't want to see us go ahead and extract those resources and provide some very good jobs for very good people who, to a great extent, will come from metropolitan Canada and who will probably not stay for longer than the job lasts in these northern communities. I think we should make sure those jobs are jobs the Inuit are able to do themselves.
I'm afraid that's what I said in 2006, and I'm taking the liberty of repeating it now because you folks were good enough to invite me along today.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.
I suspect, in fairness, what's on the minds of PDAC as much as any issue right now is their desire to see Bill C-300 voted against to keep the mining industry alive, and I'm sure Capstone Mining Corp., like other mining companies, would have something to say about that. I work very closely with them because of the mining sector's importance in the Kenora riding, and that's obviously not the purpose of today's discussion.
I want to ask you a couple of questions first, Mr. Reid. I had a chance to review your notes, and I was just going through some of the highlights and summaries from Canada's economic action plan. I noticed significantly that there was a firm commitment to the aboriginal pipeline group to continue operations as a partner in the proposed Mackenzie gas project. It seems that not only is this a substantial investment, but it is significant for that group to participate in the community economic opportunities program. I believe that's called CEOP.
I was wondering if you could comment very briefly, in a minute or two perhaps, on what you understand as the importance of that investment and what it's going to do in relation to the work with the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline.
:
Thank you, Mr. Reid. It sounds like quite an action plan. I'm sorry, we have time constraints.
I just want to move to you, Mr. Berger. In your report, I noticed that starting on page 39 you talk about certainly “[n]either in 1993 [n]or in 1999...adequate attention [being] given to estimating, and then meeting, the real costs [of bilingualism]”, something you commented on in your speech today.
You highlighted a couple of issues then, following on page 40, and you made a suggestion “that the Governments of Canada and Nunavut should develop bilateral agreements for design and implementation of this program” inter alia. There were other things like curriculum development and specific training for teachers.
Again I'm compelled to turn to Canada's economic action plan. I know you must have been very pleased in April of 2009 that our government entered into an Inuit education accord. Its founding principles were as follows: capacity building, parent and partner mobilization, and Inuit-centred bilingualism. This is a massive accord that brings in more than 13 parties from this vast region.
Secondly, because we're dealing in the here and now--that's the future component--further investments were made in college programs specifically for Inuit youth.
I'm wondering if you might comment on whether you see this government policy as a positive and favourable development towards meeting some of the objectives that you highlighted on page 40 of your report.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will start with Justice Berger.
You have a unique name, Mr. Justice. We sometimes hear the expression, “once a judge, always a judge”. Your name, Thomas, can be pronounced Thomas, just as Berger can be pronounced Berger; in that respect, I think it would be hard to figure out which of our two founding nations you are from.
I may not share your ideas on education. My riding includes the region of Nunavik. The committee has also been to Nunavut, and whenever we talk about making education available in the language and culture of the various nations, we hit a brick wall. The communities do not have any housing for teachers who would come and teach local people educational theory. Then those people could give classes on respecting their culture.
There is a university out west. A first nations university pavilion was established in Val d'Or, in eastern Canada. I got a visit from my friend, Pita Aatami, and he told me that he refused to be recognized as a member of the first nations. He said that if he could not be recognized as an Inuk, he wanted to be considered an Eskimo. In recognition of that reality, the Université du Québec changed the name of the pavilion from “First Nations Pavilion” to “First Peoples Pavilion” in order to reach members of the various communities. The university is willing to offer courses online instead of building residences for teachers to learn on site. That would probably cost the government less than building residences for teachers, when local residents are already complaining about seeing white people housed on their land when they themselves do not have housing. What is your opinion on that, as a judge?
:
In my report about Nunavut, I urged that the training of Inuit people as teachers had to be enhanced, because in the nature of things it's very likely only Inuktitut-speaking people who will be able to give instruction in Inuktitut. That presents a difficulty. The difficulties we face in Nunavut are very serious, and the problem is that Mr. Quin can offer you a concrete proposition, as Mr. Reid can: here's a pipeline; here's a mine. That's our definition of industrial progress, and these things are going to come in the north.
The question is how to ensure that the aboriginal people, who were there before these developments came and will be there after these developments are completed, are able to participate. Mr. Reid indicated the measures that have been taken in the Mackenzie Valley, and they are significant.
In Nunavut we are just, in a sense, getting started and we have a public government. This isn't an aboriginal government. The Government of Nunavut is a government of all the people, aboriginal and non-aboriginal. They can all vote; they can all run for office. And there we have promised that 85% of the jobs will go to the Inuit, because they are 85% of the population. We made that promise 18 years ago, in 1993, and we have to do a great deal more to fulfill it.
Could I just add one thing, sir? When we signed that land claims agreement with the Inuit in 1993, they surrendered their aboriginal title to Nunavut to Canada, and that has made possible our claim to complete and exclusive sovereignty over Arctic waters and the Arctic islands. It completed our case for Arctic sovereignty. That was part of the agreement we made 18 years ago. That's why—forgive me—I take the liberty of simply asking that you folks, because you have the ear of Parliament and of the government, should ask them to bear that in mind.
Just returning to my point about subsidizing education in English and French, in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, there is a not insignificant population of francophones, and the federal government has established a school in Iqaluit for French immersion, teaching of all subjects in French. That's fine, but they are not willing to do the same for teaching in Inuktitut. That's my point, and I think that if—
Thanks for that last statement, Mr. Quin. I've enjoyed some of the things you've said here today. They've rung very true. Ottawa being removed from the process is something that I think northerners have waited for decades with bated breath to see happen. All we've really seen, perhaps, is an increased amount of regulation by Ottawa.
When you talk about removing Ottawa from the process, you're suggesting that the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Nunavut should take over the process, much as a provincial government would, thereby increasing the ability of those territories to gain from resource development, even without a royalty structure. A province would look at a development like the Mackenzie gas pipeline, if it had the authority over it, and decide how that development would fit into their strategy for that region. What we see in the situation we're in now is that there is no strategy for the region because the decisions about strategy are made here in Ottawa.
There are two sides to getting Ottawa out of the process. One of them would be to provide quicker decision-making, because territorial governments would be able to run those decisions. The other side of it is that they'd be making the rules, so they'd have an opportunity to improve the rules for the gain of the people in that region. Is that not what you would see as well?