Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, would like to rise as a Member for Tu Nedhe today. It has been exactly one year today, I believe, that all of us ran for an election in 1995. We have been here for a year, elected for a year; I think it took three weeks to a month to be sworn into office, so we have not quite been at our duties for a full year. I look back over that year and see the accomplishments of Members of this Assembly on behalf of the people who elected them. Today is an important day. The Working Group of Constitutional Development will later on today table "Partners in a New Beginning", a Draft Constitution Package.
That document has been a long time in coming. People of the North have said they have heard enough talk, they want action. They do have that. Now it is up to the people of the North to be positive and move ahead and look at these things with open minds.
Mr. Speaker, I remember when I had the privilege of being elected to this Assembly, some nine years ago. I came here with a fairly narrow perspective on life in general, because I was living in Fort Resolution, and knew only the riding of Tu Nedhe. I did not really know what was happening in the other parts of the North, especially the eastern arctic. Since that time, I have had the privilege to grow and meet people throughout the Northwest Territories, and people up and down the valley. I have a general feeling that people in the Northwest Territories want to work together to keep the Western Territory together and move it ahead into the next century, as a one Government system, where it recognizes that Aboriginal people do have a right to self-government. It also recognizes reality, that we as Northerners have to work together. That is the way it has always happened in the past, regardless of whether you talk about the fur trade, or you sit and you listen to what elders say. All the time in the past, people worked together. That is how they survived.
Well, I think today, that we have to work together; all people in the Northwest Territories--in order to survive.
Mr. Speaker, in my office I have this saying on my wall, that the press will always come up with the negatives, so think positive and try to get across the positive message. And once again, the press have not let us down, and they have come out on the negative. But that should not be new to any of our Members here, as long as the public realizes that you cannot believe everything that is being said in the newspapers.
This is a good day for Northerners, and it is a good day for all Northerners. We must move ahead. We do not need the rhetoric of some politicians already coming out, elected leaders in the North, speaking against this Constitution, calling it apartheid, calling it a South African-type document. This is good for the North. We have to work together. We will work together. We will overcome the negativeness and we will work positively and we will have the Constitution made in the North by Northerners by April 1, 1999.
Thank you.