Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are a number of things that I think we should be doing. As I spoke about a few times now and in my speech, I talked about developing regional economic plans with our Indigenous governments so that every region has some industry, some infrastructure happening, and that we are conscious that we are spreading out the wealth amongst all of us.

A few things I have not talked about and I am going to bring forward now is apprenticeships. A year and a half ago, maybe almost two years ago, I was the housing Minister. I have had some portfolios. I kind of forget the timeline, but I was housing Minister for two years. My focus was really on getting people the skills so that they could maintain the houses versus pay a rent and get out, but one thing I heard in the back and I never got time to address -- because, foolishly, I thought I would keep that portfolio for four years and I realize that is not how politics works sometimes -- we only had, I believe it was, 15 apprenticeships in the whole of Housing, 33 communities and 15 apprenticeships. That is not okay. We as a government, if we are going to be taken seriously about giving work skills, then we need to actually bump that up and bring in more apprenticeship programs into our own, into the GNWT, before we go outside.

The other thing I will talk about is income support. I know that income support, like I said, we have productive choices now. I have talked in my speech about a guaranteed income so that people who are on long-term income support, instead of penalizing them, we will give them a guaranteed income, and then they can actually have more incentive to actually look for other work and they will not get penalized dollar for dollar from their money. However, the other thing that we need to look at is our productive choices. I heard within income support that, if people have diagnoses like mental health illnesses, then they do not have to do a productive choice, and I am okay with that.

However, I will share another story because Indigenous people are storytellers. I have an aunt. I don't have an aunt anymore. She has passed, my Aunt Marion. I do not know what her problem was. When I was young, Aunt Marion was older than me, and she had already had a mental illness, and so I do not know what it is. I cannot stand here and say, but she stayed on the farm with my grandma for years until my grandma passed away, and then she went into a home down in Alberta. I worried about her because she was a farm girl, so I went to see her, and Aunt Marion was in this facility. In that facility, they had a little greenhouse, and, every day, my aunt went down and watered the plants. That was her whole job, just watering plants. My Aunt Marion lived until, I think she passed away about 10, 15 years ago. She lived into old age, and she loved her job. She loved the work that she did. So I am not saying that we need to force people. I am saying that we need to open up our productive choices and make it open so that people can make choices based on what their wishes are.

The other thing that I want to talk about is our small employment fund. I believe it was $8 million I think we had gotten into the last Assembly for that. Again, we had a small community committee that oversaw that, and I was the Minister responsible for that funding. However, I started towards the end talking to the governments, the community governments, the Indigenous governments, because what I saw was that they had $8 million and they were hiring people to, "Drive that gravel truck into the community," so they were spreading out the money, you know, "Cut those logs and bring it to the elders," people were getting jobs, but they were not sustainable. That is not okay. So, towards the end of it, I had started to talk to the governments, to the people who were accessing that, and saying, "What about moving this into sustainable income, so, instead of just hiring that one person to haul your gravel from the gravel pit to the community for one time and that person gets money, what about looking at ways you can actually start your own gravel pit, that you can actually start a business on it? Instead of cutting wood for one elder and getting paid for that, what about starting it as a business and being able to sell it to other people?"

So I think we need to think out of the box again with the programs that we have. I said that earlier. We are going to have to make hard decisions. We have to make sure that our programs are meeting the intent. I do not think the answer is just throwing out free money and saying, "Here it is," because we will always be building dependency. Our goal should not be about building dependency. I don't believe in independent either because that is my father's side, that is more of a Caucasian side, with the white picket fence. My mother's side would say "interdependent." So we need to rely on each other and support each other, but we need to make these employment programs sustainable in the long term, and I think that is the key. We need to look at our productive choices and we need to look in the government and see what we are doing to build the skills and the training. Thank you, Mr. Chair.