Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I would like to start off stating that I believe the statement put forward by Minister Kakfwi. It is fair and it describes the BIP in all its glory. The only short problem that I see in the statement is it seems to miss the fact that the BIP is a subsidy. It is a subsidy from this government to business. As a subsidy, it should be looked at in that form. As we go through the budget we realize that every subsidy almost is being cut 10 percent, 50 percent or 100 percent in some cases. So, we should look at it in that form. There is no doubt that the statements made by the Minister as to the benefit of BIP at one point, probably, was all true that they did serve the purpose. I would even suggest that if you look at the number and the list of the grandfather companies and the fact that many of them are multimillionaires now is that the result of BIP? I am not suggesting that it is but I have to look at it that way too. It obviously benefited them. Some of them enough to put them in the million dollar bracket. So, we must then ask ourselves should we continue to apply BIP to these big companies. At what level do we stop applying BIP? I am not sure that if eliminating the grandfather clause will reduce the cost of implementing BIP enough so that we can say we are actually eliminating it 5 percent, 10 percent overall the cost of BIP. There is one thing that is quite obvious is that the BIP is not only in capital. BIP is right through the whole government expenditures, O and M, everything that can be confirmed by the list of companies that are grandfathered, that are benefiting from the BIP. It is through the whole system. So it is hard to track and put a dollar figure on it.

Last year I put forward a motion in this committee that we freeze the BIP until such time as we could define what exactly it is costing us and what the benefits are. Now since then, the government through briefings that we have had with them have indicated quite clearly that this BIP subsidy is still quite heavily relied on in the smaller communities although it might not be necessary anymore in the larger communities like Yellowknife or Hay River or Fort Smith. I cannot leave out Fort Smith. You know we did get a fairly good education from the government as to there being some benefits to the small communities, but I think there is one thing that came clear in the discussions that we have had with government. It is that the BIP is not necessarily required, to my understanding anyway under article 24 of the Nunavut Land Claim. It simply says in the land claim, the way I have been told anyway, that something similar to the BIP would be in place in Nunavut.