Good morning everybody.

Thank you very much for being here.

And a quick word as well too to thank the organizers for this, Christoph for putting

this on and the people that have helped as well too.

And this very much appreciate your support.

I'm Ross Prentiss as mentioned from BASSE.

We're pleased to present our proposal for development of an airship transportation network

for remote northern Canada.

A successful project would see us help increase the speed of construction of houses while

also lowering the cost of that housing overall.

So there's a tremendous problem that exists in Canada right now.

We have a huge issue in the north in terms of transportation connection and this results

in a lot of problems in terms of overcrowded housing.

So we've got more than one fifth of our First Nations people living in overcrowded housing

and over 40% of Inuit people that are even more remote and in further north, again also

in overcrowded situations.

In addition to this, you get a problem with stress and other issues with the houses because

as you're trying to put too many people in them and accommodate those people, the houses

degrade more quickly.

So as a result, we end up having even further problems.

This has created a gigantic gap in the supply and that supply gap actually continues to

increase every year because we lose ground.

We're not able to actually catch up.

So the population continues to grow and the housing supply continues to dwindle.

So this is in a large part due to the cost of building in the north.

This is for a variety of different reasons but essentially a house in the north, as you

can see, it's about four times the cost of a house in the south.

And realistically speaking, it's the same overall dimension as you get with a house

but you're just not getting nearly the value out of it.

And as a result of that, it's very difficult and it positions for us to have a lot of challenges

in terms of being able to increase the supply up there.

So realistically speaking, housing is not really the only problem.

The high cost of transportation actually results in overpricing of just about everything.

So we've got housing but also food and it also produces with limited transportation

that there's a scarcity of jobs and other things.

So we subsidize this like crazy.

We put millions and millions of dollars in every year from our government to try to help

this and even with that, we still see two and a half to three times the cost of items

and products of the north versus the south.

An example of this is shown here.

These houses are like a prefabricated house that have been put together and they are put

on on sea lift, taken up via water.

And the cost of these houses, if you see it here, it's $55,000 for the house.

The transport costs of that, sorry, that's the transport cost per house.

The actual house itself costs about $75,000.

So you're really looking at a tremendous amount of the cost of the actual item just tied up

in transportation.

The transport of building materials to the north is really being impacted negatively

by climate change.

We've got a winter road network up in the north that we've been relying upon for a long