Thank you, Madam Speaker. I left on Monday afternoon and spent the night in Calgary. On Tuesday I went to Ottawa by direct flight, and met with Allan Rock, the federal Minister of Justice, and talked to him about a number of things. One, is the firearms agreement that this legislature has been raising concerns about. I laid out the issues to him in a very direct way, and he said that he was going to go to Cabinet to see if we could get an extension, in view of the arguments that we put forward were very clear, articulate and difficult to argue against. So he seemed to have accepted our point of view that a different course or arrangement may need to be made here in the north. So on the firearms thing it looks hopeful. Perhaps by later today or Monday I will have a more firm response to it.

I made an issue with them regarding a fourth judge for the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories. If we could agree that a fourth judge was to be appointed, we should be involved in the consultation, so it isn't done just by Ottawa and he has agreed to that. We argued that if there was a fourth judge, we should prepare for Nunavut by making changes and adding specific wording in the order in council that that judge would reside in Iqaluit, since presently legislation says all judges of the Supreme Court have to reside within 30 kilometres of Yellowknife. So we have agreement with him on that as well.

There are other points I raised with him, but to be honest, I am without notes here. Those I am sure will come back to me if I stand here long enough, but I am trying to keep question period short.

I attended a Ministers' meeting the following day. I attended an evening get-together hosted by the Minister and engaged in social chit-chat, which is rare for me since I prefer to just do business. I actually lasted a whole hour. I thought I was doing exceptionally well.

There was a meeting the following day where we dealt with a number of issues. Many of the commitments made by the Liberal government, as I said, in their red book, they brought forward and said these are the things we intend to do. They are intending to move immediately on the Young Offenders Act, it is not 100 percent certain they will move immediately, but their political intention is to do that. They have had discussions about what to do with violent offenders, high risk offenders. What do we do with people like that? We talked about legislation and whether or not we are discriminating against gays and homosexuals and not providing the same benefits to them. We had discussions about aboriginal justice, community justice and there is a political agreement that aboriginal justice is not going to be just an isolated agenda item on Ministers' conference from now on, but will be understood to be a part of all the issues laid out for Ministers from now on. So all justice issues will be understood to have a parallel aboriginal perspective that must be addressed.

There were appointments of the judiciary raised by Quebec. There were a number of other concerns. Like I say, I don't have my notes so I cannot speak at great length. I will provide a more detailed statement on Monday. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Minister was very understanding and open to the suggestion we made, which was to try to delay the implementation of that regulation until the fall. That would give us time to look at alternative arrangements. While we support the safety element of the national firearms course and the test, we do not agree that firearms have anything to do with most people in the Northwest Territories. At least in the case of handguns, muskets and rifles from previous centuries. I raised a number of specific points in the course and the book itself to illustrate the point. As I said, I hope by Monday, if not today, we should have a definite answer. He had indicated the following day he was going to have a definite answer to us, but that didn't happen. It should be noted by the Members as well that when the Ministers discussed it, there was a lot of support for the notion that we should look at prohibiting handguns for use in Canada, rather than tinker with regulations simply restricting them. The suggestion was the use of handguns, per se, have no place in a firearms safety course in Canada, since the majority of us use only rifles and it is for hunting. Handguns are not in the same category whatsoever with people who use firearms and, therefore, we should not be compelled to know about handguns in order to continue using firearms the way we have. There were a number of Ministers who stood up on Wednesday and said as far as they were concerned we should look at doing away with firearms and their use in Canada. Thank you.