Mr. Speaker, thank you very much. Good morning. Mr. Speaker, over the course of time that I've been in this Legislative Assembly, we have all, at one time or another, received letters that are unsigned and it has usually been that this issue has been discussed amongst Members or with the government, but I don't believe that I've seen one of those anonymous letters tabled in this House.

Mr. Speaker, the person writing that letter is not known to us or to the general public, or even to the person who they may be maligning, and I don't think that that practice should be allowed in this House.

Mr. Speaker, in the past, we've governed ourselves and we've done things as we see they should be done in a decent fashion. Unfortunately, an occurrence has happened, a document has been tabled that has caused an employee of the Department of Public Works, of which I'm Minister, some great discomfort.

Mr. Speaker, I'm also the Minister responsible for the public service, through the FMBS, and there are fears amongst our employees that this kind of thing, if it becomes a practice, could hit on anybody. Anybody could send in a letter that's unsigned, and if you can get a Member to table it, you could experience darts thrown at not only the public service of the Government of the Northwest Territories but anybody else who lives up here who may have annoyed somebody in the Northwest Territories. So I think, Mr. Speaker, that that practice should be stopped.

And I think, Mr. Speaker, taking a little bit of latitude on the point of order that you have before you right now, you should examine the points that Mr. Kakfwi made about whether or not we should be allowed to say damaging things about people in this House, whether it be a signed document or whether it be verbally. I think there needs to be some guidance given to Members in that particular regard.

Again, I'll repeat what other Members have said and that is that we could malign somebody in here, safe and secure, knowing that nobody could get back at us, and yet we can cause people in the Northwest Territories and their families much pain and suffering. We could cause them business losses, we could cause them to lose face in communities. There's no end to the damage that we could do to people if we don't rein ourselves in to be given some direction so that we conduct ourselves in what I would call a decent fashion, where we respect the views of other people, and we deal with these issues that cause frustration and may cause embarrassment in some other way. It can be done by meeting one on one with Ministers, or it can be done by meeting with the Premier, it can be done in Caucus if it has to be done. But, Mr. Speaker, it should not be done on the floor of this House.

Mr. Speaker, with regard to unsigned letters as opposed to anonymous letters, the government did table a document that had a number of unsigned letters in it last week, but those letters did have the names of the people on the bottom who had composed those letters and were responsible for them.