Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Welcome back and welcome back Members. Many government employees were demonstrating outside the Legislative Building here today and they were here for one reason and one reason only, to

demonstrate their displeasure with the current state of their contract negotiations, negotiations that are now at a standstill. As legislators and leaders, we have choices. We can either encourage this unproductive staring contest, we can demand that the government and union get back to the bargaining table or we can try and come up with an alternative course of action.

The pay equity dispute between the government and the Union of Northern Workers has been going on now for more than a decade with a result that the government now has to pay a significant sum of money to settle this matter at a time when we can least afford it and the longer we wait, the more it is going to cost. Let us settle it. How, of course, is the nub of the question. The stumbling blocks are the job classification system and pay equity with the union demanding these issues not be part of the final contract settlement and the government stating it will be sued or possibly could be sued if these issues are not settled within the current contract. We need to settle this dispute once and for all for the sake of all northerners so we can enter division without a decade of financial baggage and bad feelings behind us.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks, it seems to me, is the amount offered and asked for in the pay equity issue. Any settlement reached, of course, has to be fair to our workers and it has to be affordable for the government. So how do we reach such a deal? What if we looked at a compromise, like the one proposed to me by one of my constituents, a pay equity package whereby each side compromises its financial offer and demand. Such a compromised financial package could then be paid out in instalments with interest, somewhat like the government is doing with the P3 process, a business process. Maybe a mortgaging system is the only way out of this situation. There are many questions I would like to ask publicly in this forum, both from the government and the union, but our system constrains me to only address questions to the Minister in this forum. I will be doing so later today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.