Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I was saying, the families including mine, were left with trying to deal with a way of life that was taken away so abruptly. Today as in the past couple of decades, we have seen the after affects of this way of life, of this prosperity taken away without any sort of plan or way of dealing with it. There were no government programs or counselling. As we see today when a mine shuts down for example, or we shut down certain operations of the government. All we had and all we do have today is welfare, social assistance, government handouts, that our formally prosperous hunters must take in order to feed their families. This is so sad, Mr. Speaker. There was some turn around or hope in the carving industry which flourished for a couple of decades, but is now in trouble. We are trying to deal with this issue. Still, there has never been anything that has replaced the sealing industry.

The subsistence lifestyle which many of our people try to lead today is very expensive. They have to buy snowmobiles, boats, rifles and gasoline. Not everybody can afford what we call the traditional lifestyle. There are attempts in things like education, the land claims settlement, regaining control of our resources and in control of government that will make the Inuit hunter's life better but those take a long time.

This brings me to the announcement yesterday which for us Inuit MLAs it basically came out as a surprise, and broad-sided us. The reason it was so important is that we suddenly had to ask ourselves was this our old friend the sealing industry, which made us prosper and had died. Was this old friend being resurrected? It certainly sounded like that. Are we in a position right now to tell our hunters that you can now brush off the rifles and the boats, and the women, you can dust off the ulus and the saviks and is there some hope. I certainly hope there is, but it bothers me in the way the announcement came about and how Inuit MLAs were left in the dark. The fact that this occurred this way, forced the Inuit MLAs yesterday for the very first time to sit together as a Caucus. Over the past three years we had issues where we thought we should as an Inuk race sit down together. There has always been somebody or a group of other people within the group that have said if you have something to say you can say it in front of Nunavut Caucus. You can say it in front of everybody. This was something that was so important that we thought that we should sit down and talk about it together. I wanted to express my feelings on that and hopefully we can get down to the bottom on what this announcement really meant. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

--Applause