I appreciate my honourable colleague's comments and in particular kind comments with my hopefully quick response to try and answer important aspects of this economic strategy. It certainly is our intention to try to fund this thing internally. It came about primarily, as I said before, because it became clear... I want to stay back a little bit. In my earlier discussions with my Cabinet colleagues and Mr. Martin in particular, he indicated to me 18 months ago that one, we have to balance the budget and two, we need to get two new formulas, east and west. Of course, I was pushing very aggressively at that time the need to try and get into the tax window to generate more revenues for the territories as a whole and make us less dependent. I recognized in the early stages when we were negotiating the two new formulas that we were asking for more money.
In these times, in the late 90's, it is a difficult thing to do, when everybody else is working on less money and deficit strategies. The timing of the issue really comes together with respect to the fact we balanced our budget, that we have two new formulas, we were close to an agreement on two new formulas, and we had an agreement in principle several months back on two new formulas, which then gave us the opportunity to move forward on the most important initiative and that was to get into the tax window. When we start to examine the tax window, it came abundantly clear that a whole variety of other things had to come in behind it. The tax window primarily relates to the non-renewable resource industry.
Therefore, to get the non-renewable resource industry moving more aggressively, there was a need to strategically place some money in a variety of areas to bring about if you want, a coordinated effort and a coordinated approach to how this government was going to move forward in finding a new fiscal relationship with the federal government. This was not something that came out of the blue. This came about because of discussions that were underway with Mr. Martin and because we had resolved both of the issues, balancing the budget and the two new formulas. It then became evident that if we are going to, certainly for myself, if I am going to leave office as I am in March 31, 1999, we wanted to make sure that we put together a blueprint for future governments that they may wish to enact upon, which would provide them with more dollars and more revenues and make them less dependent on the federal transfer payments. I hope that answers the question.