Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, this particular amendment was suggested to the Infrastructure Committee of which I am a Member. I could just not be convinced that this particular amendment was necessary. Therefore, I will not be supporting this particular motion. Mr. Chairman, my major concerns were that it seems to be an opportunity for the administration to circumvent the ratepayers. Although I have heard arguments to the contrary, I am still convinced that if the administration really believes, and in this particular case I am talking about the municipal administrators, that there are savings and that they can convince this government through the Minister and her department and then Cabinet as well, that in fact, there are savings surely they can convince the ratepayers of their particular municipality.

The suggestion has been put forward that it would take too long to get ratepayer approval and therefore a substantial amount of funding may be lost whereby the particular municipality would be paying a higher interest rate than what they may have been able to negotiate had they been given the opportunity. Personally, I believe that under the existing systems the ratepayer would be approached any time within the election time of a year. So therefore, the longest we would be looking at would be a year. I believe that the ratepayers should have opportunity to have input and it could be that I am wrong, but I would prefer to be wrong on the side of the ratepayer rather than the municipality's administrators. In this particular situation, we have a situation here where the administrators would be approaching the government rather than the ratepayers and I do not see why that should be allowed. As an example, Mr. Chairman, on a number of occasions I picked up the Yellowknife newspaper and I have read time and time again where ratepayers are upset with the administrators running the city without their input. In particularly with financial situations. Therefore, although I have not had this particular situation in my community, I would prefer to steer to the side of the ratepayers. I will not be supporting this motion. Thank you.