Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, unlike my friend from Nunakput, when I was elected, I did not expect to change the world. I knew how difficult this job could be and at times how frustrating. I knew there would be many problems that my constituents had, that I would not be able to solve, no matter how hard I wanted to. I knew this because I knew many MLAs and in speaking to them, they informed me this is the way it is and sometimes you just cannot do things. At the same time, it has been very satisfying in being able to contribute to several important projects.

I have worked on the Constitution, the Investment Strategy, Employment Strategy, Affirmative Action Review, the Family Law Review and the passage of those Acts. Although I was not successful in getting a very important amendment added to it, I am generally satisfied with the work that we have done. I would like to briefly touch on some of the aspects of the Agenda for Change that we passed when we first started.

The first thing we wanted to do was to secure our financial future. Mr. Chairman, we have balanced the budget and that is an achievement. It has been difficult, but we stuck to our guns, and I must commend all the Members in being able to stick to what we laid out. Of course we still have problems we have to deal with; the pay equity, that is going to cost a lot of money. We still have to deal with forced growth. All the children that are being born, which of course puts a strain on our education, health and income support budgets. We also have to ensure we have a detailed sorting facility in a community. Naturally it would take a lot of work to persuade me that Yellowknife is not the most logical place for that facility.

I also feel we must work on the Northern Accord so that we can get the proper royalties from our development as well as to tie employment to licences.

The next area was to improve social conditions. Mr. Chairman, we had a very difficult time to save the senior fossil fuel subsidy, but we finally did after much arm twisting. We, this government, did cut income support. I know that a lot of people are finding it is difficult time to do that. We are also trying to tie income support to productive choices, which I think in the long run, will help people to better their lives, get training and the rest of that. People do need time to adjust to that.

One of the things I do not like is the fact we now have the highest pupil/teacher ratio in Canada. I think we have to do something about this. A recent study in Ontario indicated that pupil/teacher ratio should be lowered not raised. I also like the new role we are taking in health which stresses prevention rather than cure. Of course this also takes time.

In housing, the Plan 2000 is a good plan. I naturally feel of course we need more houses allotted to the west. Under improving economic conditions, we have done a couple of good things, the Aurora Fund, which is providing investment money to businesses. Of course, this provides jobs and retains current jobs. Also the Student Employment Strategy, where we put $2 million into student employment, I understand this had helped to create hundreds of jobs in the last several months.

One thing I did not like was so much privatization. Privatization lowers our standard of living because the person who now runs that particular area of business, the owner, he makes a lot of money. The employees under that owner, usually make much less money than they would have, if they were working for government. They often need two jobs to make the same amount of money they were previously making.

Community empowerment, I strongly support community empowerment. When we first started talking about this, many MLAs said we needed to train people and take the time to consult with them. I am glad to see the Cabinet responded by putting a couple million dollars into community empowerment for training. I know that several communities are now doing things on their own, but several because of the way people have talked about it, there is still a lot of suspicion out there. Of course everybody talks about downloading and things like that. So we need to ensure that there is enough money to make community empowerment work when the communities take over certain programs.

Under developing a more effective and more efficient government structure, the first thing we did was eliminate the Department of Personnel. That, I am not exactly sure how that made us more efficient and effective, but for instance we now have people in Yellowknife running around in the morning with stacks of resumes from building to building because there is no central hiring agency. It seems like all the personnel officers are now working in the personnel areas of the different departments, so I do not see how they saved us any money. We probably have more staff working in personnel now that we did in the past.

Another thing we did was get rid of the central switchboard. So now when a person from a smaller community calls here, long distance, they look in the blue pages of the phone book and the number they get is no longer in service or they finally get through to someone, and the person they are trying to find is no longer there or they get passed around. Sometimes they have to make four or five calls to try to find where they are, who they are trying to find. So I do not know about that particular strategy either. I think something has to be done in those two areas.

I have heard several complaints also, that reducing our administration, we did do that, but we did not improve the productivity as we said we were going to do in our plan because it now takes longer to do the same things we used to do. For instance it takes longer when we put a request for information, to try to help our constituents. It takes longer to get it done.

Making Nunavut and the Western Territory a reality, I support Nunavut, but I know we are behind a couple of years in our work that has to be done. As I say, I do support Nunavut, but it should not affect the level of programs and services in the west. Also, the millions and millions of dollars that has been spent on training in Nunavut, obviously this money is coming from the federal government, but the perception is there, where the residents of Denedeh that it is unfair because they are still, territorial government dollars going into training there as well. We need a similar program for training in the west. We still have hundreds, thousands of people that need training and upgrading.

Mr. Chairman, as I said, I am generally pleased with the progress that we have made, but we do have a lot of work to do, particularly in the area of taking action in aboriginal issues which we have to work on. Those are some of those types of things I will be talking about later, when we talk about the future direction we should take. Thank you.