Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, with regard to Mr. Dent's specific questions with regard to if this bill passes today and the subsequent amendments to the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council Act, those amendments are being done right now just in case this bill does pass. And I would suggest to the House that they would not let me, nor would I propose, third reading of this bill until the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council Act was at third reading, as well. So I think that is the way that that would be handled, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, with regard to Mr. Patterson's question on what the consequences would be, in all probability -- and I am not legal counsel, I am not a lawyer, and I am not an expert in this particular field, but from the experts who are sitting with me -- and we can't second guess what a court would do -- the challenge would occur before the election. The challenge would be that we are not allowing people to vote when it has been a decision of the Supreme Court to say that they can vote. You may recall that the federal government, when they changed their act, changed it to what we are doing right now or what we are proposing, which is two years and you can vote, over two years and you can't vote.

The danger of a challenge before the election would be that the court may turn around and say all the prisoners in the Northwest Territories, regardless of how much time they are serving, can vote.

If the challenge was not until after the election, then I can't presuppose what a court would say. But we might say that an MLA had been elected and was MLA-elect in a particular constituency, let's just say there were only 10 or 15 votes in it, and let's just say that the opponents knew that there were that many people who were incarcerated for less than two years, regardless of whether it was two years, who could have voted in that particular jurisdiction, let's say there were 20 of them, so theoretically they could influence the election. A judge may then say these people should be allowed to vote.

If you take that a step further, Mr. Chairman, and they are allowed to vote, they already know what the outcome of the other voting was so then somebody may come along and say they had advance notice. In other words, they looked into the ballot boxes before they actually voted themselves. So it could be a number of those kinds of problems that would arise, Mr. Chairman, and I wouldn't venture to suggest any more. But there are all kinds out there that we just couldn't forecast.

Mr. Chairman, with regard to the question on legal aid, I really don't think that there would be any barriers put in the way of somebody in this particular area, but I would defer to Mr. Kakfwi, if he has more knowledge than I do. Thank you.