Mr. Chairman, this government is a member of a group called the Constitutional Development Steering Committee, which is made up of all the aboriginal groups of the western territory plus all of the MLAs from the western part of the territory. We have taken the last year to put together a draft work plan. We have agreed to work on a process that would see us coming up with a draft constitution for consideration by all of the people in the western territory in the next three years. We put together a budget and a work plan and submitted it to Minister Irwin in December. The budget is a few million dollars. It is a very well thought out plan for how to go about the work we want to do.
We should make a note that it is a different approach trying to pacify those people who get very squeamish about feeling left behind by Nunavut people. While Nunavut is an establishment of a public government, like the territorial government as it is now, the Constitutional Development Steering Committee is planning to set up a public government that will very likely be a very different character. So it is not just a territorial government as it is now for the west. We are hoping to come up with something that is very different, possibly with elements of an aboriginal nature, perhaps a marriage of aboriginal and public government. We hope that the federal government will respond to us in the next few weeks. We had anticipated a response by now. But perhaps with the development of a position by Treaty 8, which says they want to set up their own aboriginal self-government, the federal government will see the need to respond very quickly to a group that wants to explore a greater option and not just leave us frustrated by individual groups trying to vie for their own regime without any group trying to put a large overall scope to political and constitutional issues.