Thank you. It's patently wrong to ignore an agreement. We had meetings with Indigenous leaders yesterday, and one of the comments was that the employees of the GNWT, at least the senior management or the people who deal with Indigenous governments, should be familiar with the agreements and the content of the agreement, and I think that's an excellent policy. I think moving forward, it's something we need to implement because to just ignore something that is written and so obvious, that's just plain wrong.

Negotiated contracts have fallen out of favour in the last government, it seems. The government was very concerned about their bottom line. They didn't want to spend a penny more than they had to. It didn't matter if that meant that the money would flow out of the territory. I know, in the South Slave, when there is a negotiated contact, what often happens is that, if there was work to be done near a community, the company will go to the community and talk to the Chief and Council and say: what can you do for this project? Are people looking for work? What can you offer?

It's more than just a company getting money. In many cases, even when it's a private company, we need to start looking at the benefits of keeping money in the territory on a larger scale in terms of negotiated contacts, but when it comes to following the letter of an agreement, that's a no-brainer. Thank you, Mr. Chair.