Mr. Chairman, all I wanted to say on that point, and again it is not in my constituency, but I do say this to the Minister, and I guess through him, to his officials. I think that there has to be a time when we refuse to accept the federal argument. There has to be a time, and I hope that our officials, when they are at the negotiating table, take some strong positions on this particular matter, because I know in the end, we may be in for a longer fight, and that is all part of the strategy we are going to deal with, in terms of dealing with this situation, but I do not think it is necessary to develop a strategy to say to the government, "We are not going to take any more of this off-loading stuff". We cannot simply suggest to the Government of Canada that this is going to be an acceptable manner in which they treat the Government of the Northwest Territories, or for that matter, officials who are negotiating on our behalf. That is not acceptable. It should not be acceptable by government, it should not be acceptable by the Assembly, and I doubt very much that other people would accept that this is the way we should accept off-loading from the Government of Canada. I think the circumstances, for instance, Mr. Chairman, in Manitoba, that was under the leadership of Phil Fontaine, all the status Indians sent their bills not to the Blue Cross, but actually to the Department of Health or to the Department of Indian Affairs.

It is interesting to note, Mr. Chairman, that in the Yukon, there is a bureaucracy still in place to deal with this issue, and what surprises me, is that there is no request for reduction of services there. In fact they have accepted the fact that until the transfer decision is made, and that is ongoing right now, they are in fact, responsible agents on behalf of status Indians, and I make that mention because I think we accept it, that we will be responsible, we would deliver services better, but we cannot accept the responsibility of the federal government in this area, and I do not think that we should do it. I just wanted to make that comment. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.