Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect. If elected as Premier, I would love to have an immigration program, but right now immigration is a federal responsibility and so we have been hampered by our ability to increase our population because we have quotas that we have to live with. I think we have 160 quota and we have been able to increase our immigration on an incremental basis by, I think we are up 50 to 60 people. We would like to have it more in maybe the 1,000 range or so, but it is very difficult to do that.
With regards to Syrian refugees, we contributed $50,000 to the United Nations on behalf of the Syrian refugees. We are actively involved with the Government of Canada on Syrian refugees. We are looking at what we can do. We are working with city council, who has a committee of interested citizens to sponsor Syrian refugees. We looked at the process. In order to sponsor refugees, you have to be recognized as a sponsor. In the Northwest Territories we only have one sponsor that is registered, and that is one of the local churches which has gotten recognition through the national church arrangement. The officials in the Department of ECE are canvassing the churches to see how many would like to find a way to be recognized as an official sponsor, and I think, as more Syrian refugees come into Canada, we can get into that program by adding those sponsors and having everybody working together.
We also have a Foreign Investment Program through ITI which we need to... There is a lot of interest in foreign investment in the Northwest Territories with the influx of foreign tourists from China, Japan, Korea. There is lots of interest in building resorts and so on for these tourists to visit and live in, but we are hampered by a number of things. One is that we don't have enough resources in our foreign investment division to process all of the applications, so it has taken some time. It's frustrating to foreign investors. Again, we need to be able to access more immigration quota from the Government of Canada. Thank you.