Mr. Chairman, as usual, I'm certainly always open to good advice. But if you want to talk about creative tension there's plenty creative tension there, I can testify to that. Part of the reason is because of the financial difficulty we find ourselves in with the federal government and the drawback of funding for specific programs.

I guess one of the things that...Like you said, there are different styles. Different people like different styles. To me, the people who are in the central agency are the trench workers. There are enough politicians around to set political agendas. Sometimes there's just too many of them because there's too many political agendas. How do we, as an executive, deal with that? I can assure you that there's been a lot of so-called priorities put off the table with the consent of Ministers. They brought them forward, we've discussed them, but we can't do them. As many as you see on the table, that many have been taken off. It's a discomfort for some of the Ministers who have brought those initiatives forward.

Some of the criticism is in getting into the financial situation we are in, how do we effectively, as executive Members working together, get the best that we can out of the resources? As an example, we tried for many, many years to do something on income reform and social reform. It has not been without trying, of previous executive Members, but we couldn't break through those barriers in talking to the federal government because they wouldn't accept the fact that maybe we could have different guidelines and tie income reform more to productivity. We could never get that out of the previous government.

This government, and unfortunately may have been pushed into a situation, has decided that perhaps they should change the income reform around so it will be more adaptable, more tied to productivity.

We've had on the table, for many years, a harvester support program which was difficult to try to put together. We knew we wanted to do something about that. In the last eight years, there's been, to my recollection at least, 16 or 17 different proposals which kept getting sent back because, we don't know how to fund it. Education training has always been a number one priority in this government. I think now we have an excellent opportunity to pull together a lot of those fragmented -- not fragmented, but different -- ideas to deal with issues that have been long outstanding in the communities. I think we have that opportunity now because our funding partner, the federal government, appears to be more open about how we can move these funds around.

When we were discussing our priorities we have always looked to the social well-being of a community and how we put the resources and people to work? How do we educate people so that they can be construction workers, plumbers, et cetera.

Housing was an area that had the most immediate possibility to get people working because there was a wide variety of things that you could do and there was generally two, three, or four houses in each community. That goes into the education pot, the social well-being pot because people are being trained and people are receiving remuneration for their efforts and working in construction, or even people who are already trained.

To build on that and say how can we, rather than just talk about welfare, wildlife, and other specific areas, put them together so we can channel our best efforts to get people working in a more productive society, rather than having them walk into the welfare office and say there's no jobs, I have nothing to do. I think we have possibilities.

There have been many papers and issues that have been brought forward. How do we put that together for the healthy well-being of the people that we represent? I think we have the possibility of doing it. It won't be called housing or shouldn't be called wildlife resources. It should be something like healthy lifestyles. How do you get people going? How do we get people moving? I don't see why we can't stimulate people to feel that, even though they don't immediately see the possibilities of a job when they get their grade 12, to instill in them the value that it's important. If you can get there, there are other possibilities. It makes you more mobile. What's wrong with a person who has an engineering degree being a trapper? My father has an engineering background and he decided to be an explorer, a frontiersman and go trapping. He knew a lot of things, he learned how to trap, but he had other things to go with it. I think we have to get that positive attitude out to people. Get them involved.

All of these initiatives that are there should be channelled into the social healthy well-being of people. That comes under one category and how do we build everything we do to support that initiative, or that goal? I really believe that we've got the opportunity.

The Minister of Education, Culture and Employment is seeing his portfolio expand to take in more of these initiatives to provide a base for people to get on their feet. I know that he's done excellent work and really strove to get ourselves involved with some of the programs that are available out there that will enhance, some of the programs that are already here in the Northwest Territories, but may not have the dollars that we want. If we can tap into those federal initiatives perhaps there's an opportunity to answer a lot of the questions that have come in different reports here and there and maybe we can accommodate them. I think we just have to look at healthy lifestyles, productivity in people and try to support that. I believe that people in the communities know that it's not healthy to sit at home watching TV and not be productive because it really hurts them in the end.

I would like to gear towards healthy lifestyles and that takes in all the different projects we might have and maximizing whatever we do.

I know that's a long dissertation, but I just want to say these things because I know that sometimes we get an affirmative action paper and it's seems that if we don't specifically answer to affirmative action papers, it seems we're doing nothing. I think if we can get opportunities to people so that they can become affirmative within themselves, then something has been done. If a social worker in the community is proactive and has the ability to move dollars around to focus people towards education, we'll accomplish that. I thinks that is but one path that all the different initiatives can take. Thank you.