Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to comment on the Minister's comments. I did not say I was
against division, that I am trying to slow it down. I do not think I said that, and that is not what I meant. My point is that the political system will be in place by April 1, 1999. But a lot of planning needs to take place in order to transfer departments and staff and organizations.
I think that should be given a lot of thought and a lot of opportunity to institute properly. Initially, and I go back some years ago, the plan was to have a ten year transition plan and that disappeared because it was too long. Fine. But I think there is nothing wrong with looking at a transition period beyond 1999. And not for the reasons of harming Nunavut, or being against Nunavut. It is just a situation that makes good planning. After all, we only have 790 days. What are we going to do, transfer every employee, every department, every organization, everything that we run over to Nunavut by that specific date? What is the reason for that? Why can we not take an extra year to do that? There is nothing wrong with that. That just makes good business sense.
I am not against the political existence of Nunavut. Far from it. I think the other point I would like to make, which I did not speak about before, was centralized/decentralized. People are going to be sitting here some years from now saying let's centralize, because we are going to decentralize here today. I understand the arguments for that. And I can see the arguments for it. But it will come around again, believe me, and I think we should really, seriously sit here sometimes and say, "all of this decentralization, is that going to pay off?" Yes, some of it will, because you do need to have people in communities making decisions, but we do not need to do it overnight. Let's get some success stories for this before we proceed with 52 communities to have community empowerment, for example, in every area that this government runs. And do that in the next year. That is not essential. Thank you.