Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I will start off by complimenting the Standing Committee on Social Programs for the amount of work they put into this bill and the department. I note that on the information I have been supplied with, they have suggested amendments to the Adoption Act, which have been ongoing now for at least ten years. I can confirm that, Mr. Chairman, because I believe it was in the mid-1985, in that area I had the privilege of being on the Family Law Reform committee representing the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation for a short term and the Adoption Act, was one of the concerns at that time. This has been around for a long time. Taking that into consideration, and also taking the amount of time the committee has been involved in redrafting the act into consideration as well, you would think that all concerns would be addressed by this time. However, we must take into consideration that political jurisdictions have been changing dramatically over the last number of years. I note that the Nunavut Social Development Committee is strongly opposed to this legislation at this time. Mr. Chairman, I have great respect for the Nunavut Social Development Committee and I have great respect for the amount of work they have been doing in trying to have these types of legislation available in Nunavut. I do not believe that simply because they did not show up at the time the committees held their meetings, we should ignore the fact that they seem to have legislative input into this type of act that would have a great impact on the residents of Nunavut. We cannot ignore that fact. We also have to take into consideration that I note under self-government negotiations in the Beaufort, one of the duties and responsibilities that could be passed onto the self-government group would be the Adoption Act, and adoption authority. I do not know if this suggests that they would come out with new legislation or not, but we must take that into consideration.

There seems to be not as much objection to having the bill inactive in the western part of the territory whenever and have the amendments to it made at an appropriate time to have it taken into consideration under self-government agreements and what type of authority these agreements would give to the aboriginal groups, but I note that in Nunavut both NTI and Nunavut Social Development Committee would like to see this bill delayed until April 1, 1999. They were asking the Minister not to enact the bill until that day. I am fully in support of this because I do not see if we live with the existing bill for 15-years while it was being reviewed, another six or eight months is not going to make that much of a difference. Mr. Chairman, I will be putting forward a motion to amend the act as proposed at the appropriate time today, to suggest that this act should not come into force until April 1, 1999. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.