Under this legislation I have no rights or powers to force the government to do anything. The powers that are given to me in this legislation are to make recommendations. What I do is take the information that comes to me from the communities and make sure that the government is aware of it. If there are concerns in the communities then I would like to know about them. I would like to be able to draw that from a number of different sources so that I can say it is not just this one person or just this one community that wants it. I am able to make the government aware of the fact that this is an issue that is important to a lot of people so that they do pay attention to it. As far as the teaching is concerned, I did write a letter to the department asking what efforts were being made at teaching those new writing systems. You did mention Arctic College, Justice, Education and Culture and Communications. I know most of the staff that work in those offices and I have talked to them over the last few years and try to keep in touch with most of them. I know that they are all trying to use the same system but outside of the government, how do you tell somebody who works with a particular church, or who comes as a contractor for the government, you have to use this particular writing system. I know that is one of the areas in which there is some difference between what the churches are doing when they are reading and writing in the Dene languages and what the government is doing. I do not know what the answer is. Is there some way of forcing people to use a particular writing system?
Perhaps, as I said, this Assembly could make a motion to say that all contractors who work for the government shall be using the standard orthographies and all government departments must use it and must check. For example, I have had a number of complaints that signs are spelled incorrectly when they go out to the communities. When they finally do get them in a native language, there is a complaint that they are not spelled properly. Maybe there should be a procedure in the government for having all of those signs or publications checked to make sure that they are done in the standard that is accepted by the government.
Whether it is writing systems, terminology or whatever, the whole problem lies with who has the authority to force people to follow that particular writing system. That has kind of been a vacuum. There is no body, other than this Legislature I suppose, saying, "this is our directive to the government. Make sure that all our departments and institutions follow that." Outside of that, I do not know if there is another mechanism that you can use to make every individual conform.