Mr. Speaker, the people of Nunavut have indicated early last year that they would prefer to develop an economic strategy at a time and of a nature of their own choosing and did not wish to necessarily have one developed at this time or in tandem with one for the Western Territory, so a draft economic strategy was prepared only for the western part of the Northwest Territories, initially by Bailey and Associates, and presented to this government in November. The government received the document, as Members are aware, the MLAs were not provided with copies of that draft because we felt substantive revisions had to be made to it; so we held the original draft and sent it back to the contractors with requests for substantive revisions.

It came back in February as a discussion paper to facilitate discussions in the Western Territory about what an economic strategy might look like in the Western Territory. I was assigned responsibility for the economic strategy in January, and discussions with Cabinet and various community leaders in the Western Territory felt it was not prudent for us to advance a draft economic strategy that was developed at the territorial level largely by consultants. We had the paper revised to basically be a discussion paper that we could use in advancing the idea of an economic strategy, and we took the view that we have to go to the community leaders, largely the aboriginal leaders in the Western Territory, and ask them to work with us in developing an economic strategy for the Western Territory. That is really where we are now at this time. Thank you.