Mr. Chairman I cannot speak so much to Article 23, which has to do with training and GNWT applications to training. I would leave that for the Education Minister. But Article 24 spells out the obligations of the GNWT and supporting Inuit businesses and the increasing participation rates of Inuit individuals and businesses in government contracting.
As you know the GNWT shared its interim measures last spring. We have been involved in ongoing consultations with NTI on fine-tuning those measures and implementing those measures in preparation for a final policy.
How this Article will affect or be affecting by community empowerment is an issue that I guess requires more thought but it is clearly my position and as far as I am concerned, the government's position that communities should have policies in the Nunavut region that would follow - that would force them to live up to Article 24, which as I said many times in this House, is a constitutionally protected agreement.
The - if I may add - the debate up to now has been if we are going to empower communities, how far are we willing to go? The issue for some people is - if we want true empowerment that we give the money over to the communities without strings attached. But, as far as I am concerned, the government always had and still has policies that while we spend these monies delivering programs that we have to deliver legally and under our policies, at the same time we will use that money to make sure that employment is enhanced in the communities.