Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This has been of ongoing interest to the Minister for some years. We not only supported the establishment and the appointment of the Circumpolar Ambassador, Mary Simon. When she indicated interest in visiting the Northwest Territories, it was our ministry that did the support work to ensure that the meetings she wanted were arranged and scheduled appropriately for her. We ensured that there is a committee set up of the deputy ministers to ensure that the work is being done to lobby for an Arctic council and information is provided to Mary Simon's office, and, certainly to our own, about the work that she is doing overseas and in the United States; and to do political assessments of the developments that are occurring as a result of her own personal presence in that office.

Just one more point; we, as a government, wrote to the Prime Minister shortly after the appointment of Mary Simon and before she went to Ottawa, which resulted in the Prime Minister writing a letter to President Clinton of the United States, and this has acquired his support for the establishment of an Arctic council. So that type of work is being done and it is producing results. It is not as a result of our own intervention, but it is a result of that with many other things, especially the personal presence of Ambassador Mary Simon, that lent tremendous credibility to this quest for more circumpolar relations and the establishment of the Arctic Council.