Mr. Chairman, I would just hope that we can be vigilant enough about our health, that instead of measuring whether an industrial project produced disease of some kind, because we monitored the health of the people before, and after, instead of doing that, I would hope that we would have stood up and said, to whoever was making that decision, this project cannot go ahead in this form, or cannot go ahead at all because we predict that it will harm the health of the people. I think that is the preferable way to do it, rather than measuring how sick they got after.
Just consulting with my Deputy Minister on that point, Mr. Chairman, I think we do measure certain basic things, like the weight of infants at birth, and basic health statistics and mortality rates and that sort of thing. We do not take the kind of detailed sampling that the Member is suggesting. I think that is would possibly be very expensive to do that, at least in the whole Northwest Territories, but if there is any area where this should be done, I would like to hear about it, and I would be open to working on that. I would like to say, that as far as cancer is concerned, Mr. Chairman, there is a very easy way to reduce the higher incidents of cancer in the Northwest Territories, and that is by attacking the single largest cause of cancer, and that is cigarette smoking. That would be a wonderful way, if we could reduce that, a wonderful way of reducing cancer. We know all about it, we know all about the horrendous rates of smoking in the Northwest Territories and if the Member is concerned about cancer, that is a thing that we can do to tackle cancer deaths and rates of cancer, is to tackle smoking. Thank you.