Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, for the past number of years, while I have been in the employment of the government, I have been involved with a good number of programs related to employment and training of aboriginal peoples. I started off with a program called NORTRAN when I was at university. NORTRAN was a program that was associated with the oil and gas industry, pipeline and pumping services that were required for that industry. It recruited northern people and, based on their talents and interest in particular jobs, they would take them to places, expose them to that type of work, and give them the training they needed in the event that the pipeline would be built in the north and that the oil and gas industry would take off.

Later on, I was involved with the office of native employment. That was the beginning of what is now called equal opportunities, I believe. There, I was involved in developing an inventory of aboriginal people, their education, and their skills, and tried to match them up with jobs that were becoming vacant, so we could put more aboriginal people in jobs in the territorial government. That worked fairly well.

I must say that with NORTRAN, the success rate was pretty good for the length of time that I was involved with the program. I believe there are a couple of Members in this Chamber here that may have been associated in some way with it, and who I had the pleasure of working with.

The office of native employment was relatively successful and it eventually became the equal opportunities program and the forerunner to the affirmative action program. I then moved to the northern careers with the federal government and that did the same thing, Madam Speaker. It recruited who we referred to at the time as high flyers, aboriginal peoples who had a talent that the government could use and who had a desire to work with the federal government. I see my time is up, Madam Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude.