Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, last week here in Yellowknife, I had an opportunity to attend part of the geoscience forum that is held annually to inform the industry of new technologies and events in the mineral world. Featured this year was the discovery of diamonds or diamond-bearing rock formations in the Northwest Territories, that I'm sure everybody is well aware of. The great stake and rush of 1993 will certainly go down in history, equal to the gold rushes of the late 1800s.
The information was abundantly available in the seminars. I had a chance to sit in on a couple of them to listen to the talks about where they find diamonds. It kind of brought to mind some facts about rock formations that a lot of northern people are familiar with, but had never realized the value of. They may have passed over these areas numerous times and, perhaps, remarked about the peculiarities of a type of formation, especially along cut banks and things of that nature. If they had known even the basics of geology, they may have been able to share in part of these mineral discoveries.
Something that I've been thinking about, and others have mentioned it numerous times too, is that more northern people should be taking basic geology courses. They travel across the land in their normal pursuits, trapping and hunting and things like that, and they do come across areas that, at some point, could be valuable and could lead to their participation. A basic geology course offered to northern people certainly would go a long way. Thank you.