Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is my impression that there are a lot of good recommendations here and especially with respect to improving the public service and the human resource sector that we have. As I said earlier, they are very valuable to us and we need to concentrate on them and improve and provide opportunities for them to improve. With regard to the affirmative action area, I do have questions and problems with certain areas. For instance, Mr. Henry also referred to the fact that representation is based on population rather than the labour force. I am not sure that you can go by, in my opinion, just general population and make it representative according to that because I am not sure we are going to get the number of qualified people to be able to fill the positions, but if you go according to at least identifying a labour force, then I think that makes statistically a lot more sense.

Also, in the area of representation, I have referred to that before, it is easy to have a blanket policy across the NWT government, but I think there are areas where we have succeeded in the government with representative labour force and there are other we do not but we need to analyze why we do not. We cannot just say, well, management should be made up of all women or all aboriginal. We need to address why they are not represented according to qualifications. There are areas where it is impossible to fill with northerners because we just do not have them. We do not have enough people that qualify in certain areas. You cannot tell me that you can fill doctors, lawyers, fire, medical, a lot of the technical positions. It will take years.

That leads me to my final point. I think this is all based upon getting our population up to speed with education and qualifications. Once we have that in our population, we heard statistics and we all know them. The education of a lot of our people is just not there. It is not there. So how can we say, well, we have to put these people into a lot of these positions. I think, when we get the qualifications for people, and Mr. Erasmus is a very good proponent for this, he keeps hammering away at the fact that we have to get our people up to speed on education. He is absolutely right. We have to get people up there. But I have a problem in that end when we deal with the affirmative action to generally say we have to have a representative work force when perhaps we do not have the qualified people in many areas. I break it down according to statistics. I do not have a breakdown so I have problems with this whole thing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to say I congratulate the committee because it is good work in many areas here and the Cabinet should pay attention to a lot of these recommendations, but there are areas, as I say, that I have a problem with. Thank you.