Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect. Late in the life of the 16^th Assembly, the Minister of Finance stood up in this House and provided a fiscal update, which was quite bleak. We do know that there are significant cost increases in the GNWT and our revenues don't tend to be growing at a rate that's going to continue to cover these in the long term, so we have to think differently about how we do business.

We have to look at how our departments are operating and how our departments are running. We know that there are programs out there that have been around for a really long time that haven't necessarily been reviewed or updated. We need to make sure that those programs and services are continuing to meet the needs or the intent of why they were created, and if they are not, we need to change them or eliminate them in order to bring in programs that are going to meet the needs of our people.

I've been sitting around with Members for the last two weeks and there's a lot of talk about what we need to do, and a lot of those things come with a price tag. But once again, we don't have significant revenues coming in and we have a lot of pressures on us. Like my colleague said, collective agreements are coming due. We have a lot of things happening, so we need to be responsible with our finances. We need to look at our programs to make sure that they are continuing to meet the needs that they were originally intended to, and if not, we need to do something differently. As we design new programs, we need to make sure that we have solid evaluation frameworks so that we make sure they are meeting their needs over time so that they can be assessed on a regular basis, and if they aren't meeting the needs, change and modify accordingly.

All the Members in this House are going to be required to make some incredibly tough decisions over the life of this Assembly, given our fiscal reality and the demands for more and more programs all the time. We are going to have to sit down and have long discussions, informed discussions, which means Cabinet is going to have to provide all the updates, all the information so that we can make informed decisions together on how to manage our finances. This is a partnership. This is teamwork that we need to have in order to move this Assembly and this government forward and I look forward to that opportunity. Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect.