Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Ballantyne has covered pretty well most of the area relating to the financial arrangements we have and so on. What I have to offer is only a couple of points. One of them maybe not so serious and the other one very serious. I used to work in Ottawa for a short time and bureaucrats have made their reputations by inventing a word. It's not a new word, but they come up with a word and this word becomes part of the jargon of the public service and gets currency right across the country. Words become famous because they come up with words like perversity.
Everybody uses it then, "the perversity factor." For years I used to laugh when people talked about reprofiling, "reprofile the money." I asked, what do you mean, "reprofile the money?" It's the same looking money. A profile to me means an outline. It looks the same to me. They use reprofile to mean they take it from one place and put it somewhere else. That's all they mean. All perversity means is we're digging in our heels, that's all. So, they call us perverse. Because we're digging in our heels and we don't go along and do the same things the provinces are doing in terms of taxation, we are in fact guilty of violating the perversity factor.
My suggestion to the Minister is maybe he should get his bureaucrats to work on a few of our own words we would like to use. Use a bit of time on a Friday to give you some words to use to battle these people in Ottawa. Perversity is something you have to battle with, so they should give you a better word so you can go and use your own jargon. Maybe that word will eventually catch on and everybody will be using it across the country. That's half serious, but it's true. This is what happens. People feel so proud of a word and have ownership of it and they won't get away from it. It's the only thing that matters and it's all they throw back at you. Get them onto something else.
The other point I want to make, and it's been hinted at but not made as clear as it could be, maybe. Mr. Allooloo was looking for support for this at OMC this morning. It's not a Yellowknife issue. It's an issue he raised in relation to a contract in the eastern Arctic. It seems to be a little bit remote from what we're discussing, but I'll try to make the point as briefly as I can.
There was an agreement with the Inuit under their claim that with any major business that was going to be conducted in the eastern Arctic involving the federal government's contracting for work, there would be a process to make sure that the Inuit could become involved and take advantage of economic opportunities. I have said for at least 15 years that the eastern Arctic is within the orbit of Quebec. Anything that goes on in the eastern Arctic, the people in Quebec see as part of their wider empire.
That goes back all the way to the 1970s when they used to have a map showing Quebec going all the way up, including Baffin Island and everything up to the North Pole. That was going to be Quebec. This is the early years of the constitutional talks. Anything that goes on over there is seen as being within the economic orbit of the province of Quebec, and that's going to be the biggest challenge for Nunavut. One of the biggest challenges will be to make sure that with whatever goes in in the eastern Arctic, there will be some economic advantage to the people who live there.
As Mr. Pollard briefly mentioned, the federal government will do everything it can to placate the people of Quebec for historical reasons. The people in the east will always lose out. My question to the Minister is this, what are the tax implications when you know that all these major projects that are going to come up in the eastern Arctic involving federal contracts are going to go to Quebec companies and you're going to have people coming in from the south to do the work? What kind of power do we have -- and I know we don't have any legal power -- to make sure that activity that takes places in the eastern Arctic will accrue taxes to the benefit of the people of the Northwest Territories through our government?
That's the major issue we'll be facing in the west and in the east, in my opinion anyway, where it is a far bigger problem. The east will go its own way but will be seen to be very much within the federal government and the orbit of the province of Quebec. We've got several years yet, another five or six years, when we are going to have to face up to this program.
I mentioned the Avati attempt to get a contract to do the clean-up on the bases in the eastern Arctic because these old DEW Line sites have been a subject of discussion in this House for years now. We are the ones who brought them to the attention of the federal government with regard to doing something about it. It's been an issue for us. Now, it is an economic opportunity and nothing happens. We don't get anything out of it.
Is there any way at all in which we could look at making sure that the people that work there can benefit? We must be able to come up with some system of registering workers or something so we can make sure that we do something more than just a payroll tax to get some money out of them. The payroll tax doesn't do that much. Thank you.