Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Tuesday evening I had a constituency meeting in Fort Simpson and one of the opportunities to address the citizens in Fort Simpson. I also represent five other communities and it is difficult to have one constituency meeting for everybody, so it takes awhile to get around.

Mr. Speaker, the concerns raised there were just general questions about what are we going to do for division and concerns with other issues like health and social services, the road and NAV Canada. One of the areas it is looking into the future is in development of the natural resources that we have in the Nahendeh constituency. There is a boom going on in the southwestern part of the Northwest Territories and the Fort Liard area. We have oil and gas, gas was discovered there last year. There are going to be about nine different wells drilled this year. The concern there is that people in that area are saying we are overlooked because there are diamonds in everybody's eyes here and all our efforts seem to be focused on that. There should be more effort put into looking at developing our natural resources. We have forestry there as well, but the main thing in our area is tourism.

I think this is the concern that citizens in my constituency are concerned about, how can we best capitalize on what we have? We should try to do it the right way and try to keep most of the resources and revenues generated from our natural resources to flow into the north rather than have, them escape into the south. This is the position that was explained to me. We have all these different natural resources and this government is making an effort to do all we can to capitalize on them, but I think the feeling there is that we have to put more effort and energy into working together with people in the community and this government to make sure we truly benefit from our natural resources in that area. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

--Applause