Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'm going to talk about Northern Transportation Company Limited. NTCL is northern Canada's oldest Arctic marine operator, and among Canada's largest barging companies. Since 1934 NTCL has provided reliable and critical marine transportation services to communities and resource exploration projects along the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories and across the Western Arctic, from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and as far east as Taloyoak in Nunavut. Services to Taloyoak have been recently terminated due to the financial constraint of the company.
The core business of NTCL is cargo transportation. In five short months every year, from June to October, NTCL has moved millions of tons of cargo in our seven and a half decades serving Northerners, and are as much a fixture of northern summer life as 24-hour sunshine. However in the eyes of many Northerners this may not be the case. The people of the Arctic, the Inuvialuit and the Inuit, are customers, owners, and after decades of delivering sealift cargo since 1985, NTCL has been a 100 per cent Inuit-owned company, and is a founding member of the NorTerra group of companies. NorTerra is owned by the Inuvialuit Development Corporation of the Western Arctic on behalf of the Inuvialuit of the Western Arctic and the Inuit of Nunavut. The department has reached out to other potential supply and transportation providers and is confident that the new contracts will meet the resupply needs of the Petroleum Products Program and to the Northwest Territories Power Corporation. Mr. Speaker, my region of Nunakput relies heavily on petroleum products and dry goods delivered to the communities, and later on I will have questions to the Minister of Public Works. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
