Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect. This is a very important area, a very important question, and especially when we see the effects of climate change, especially when we know that the world is seeing a significant change with the signing of this Climate Change Protocol. Certainly, we will do our part.

Previous governments have looked at the fact that carbon tax or carbon pricing would increase the cost of living for people in the Northwest Territories. We're already paying a very high price for fuel and energy, so we've tried to address that by having government pay for ways to reduce carbon emissions. We have the Greenhouse Gas Strategy where we've been able to reduce our emissions so that we reached 2005 levels in the government, and we've been very successful by introducing programs into our government whereby we reduce emissions and we've saved money. We're also leading the country in biomass and we, on a per capita basis, I find it unusual, but apparently per capita we're one or two in Canada utilizing solar energy.

We want to invest more into energy efficiency and conservation, and I think this is one of these areas where I think it would be an excellent way to go out and have public engagement on this issue to confirm that NWT residents are willing to pay more on carbon pricing or carbon tax or what have you, to see if they're interested and they're willing to do that to help reduce the carbon footprint. I think this is an area that, as an Assembly, we could look at doing and could do something fairly quickly. We could engage the public and get direction from the public and take appropriate action.