As the Finance Minister responsible for ensuring, to some extent, there is transparency on the fiscal side, I could not agree more with my honourable colleague. There is also clearly a need for accountability and nobody would deny that and we need to ensure that happens. In these days of public perception of politicians and mini-series, et cetera, one wonders what it takes to assure the public that at least my colleagues that I work with are straightforward, honest, and try to do the best they can with a public purse. I have to say that. I think that is important. I am getting to be personally a little fed up with sometimes the accusation that if you are successful you must be doing something wrong whether you are in business or in politics. You fundamentally get into politics for a variety of reasons. I got into politics thinking I would try and do some good for people. I hope we have been able to demonstrate that. I fundamentally believe that is the accountability. All one has to do is go back and look at the Hansard when I was the chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance. The same questions you are asking, I asked. What we need to do is work out how we do that. At that same time, protect the private interests of people who have been on jobs and do tender on jobs, et cetera. I am committed to, as I said to you, to trying to re-evaluate some of these policies we have in place.
I really did not want to get into this, but I will since you brought it forward. My honourable colleague has been around a long time, and I have a lot of respect for her and I want to say that publicly again. Think back what it was like ten, 15 years ago. Think back what it was like 20 years ago and say to yourself, who would have owned the businesses in some of these communities? Where would the aboriginal people be if some of the governments, and it was not me, it was my predecessors, took the brave step to say, we are going to negotiate contracts because we want to find a balance within the economic constituency? Where would we be today? I do not want to name, but would it be the outsiders that continue to take the economic opportunities out of this country?
I ought to remind everybody else because I have done some research on this. Negotiated contracts were done by Yellowknife people who were non-aboriginal for justice buildings, for other institutions in the 1970s and I did not hear anybody screaming then. I did not hear anybody saying it was wrong then when non-aboriginal people were negotiating contracts. But all of a sudden our predecessors who had far more wisdom than I did, Mr. Rae, Mr. Citizen, Mr. Park of the foreign commission said, we are going to find a way to change this government's policies to provide a balance to the economic constituency and it is going to be through negotiated contracts and at the same time protect the public purse. I has to be fair, cost effective, et cetera. There would be no ownership in my riding if we had not done these kinds of things. There would be no ownership in some of these other constituencies if we had not done these things. In saying that, and the reason I have given you a little historical perspective is because it is very important to me that you understand where I am coming from. In saying that, you need to examine, no question, what we have done over the last ten years. I am prepared to commit to re-examining that. But I am not apologizing for the fact that we needed to put aboriginal people into the economic constituency. It not only created some wealth, equity and ownership, it created jobs, et cetera. That is very important to me. That was an important decision made by my predecessors that I have strongly supported since I was elected and will continue to do until such time as I leave office. I will say that it needs to be re-examined in a spirit of fairness to the non-aboriginal long term northern economic constituency. I am prepared to do that. Thank you.