Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in general I believe this is a good motion, a proper motion and an area that the government does need to concentrate its efforts in. There is no question in my mind that during the Constitutional Working Group meetings a great issue was always one of the unresolved
land claims and self-government issues and in the end that became a stumbling block to proceed.
There is also the additional uncertainty in the minds of industry of organizations that want to do business throughout the Northwest Territories and development. I believe that with the settlement of land claims and self-government issues, we get a lot of that uncertainty out of the way. We get a lot of the uncertainty out of the way when movement starts taking place and interest by governments and aboriginal groups are directed towards that. Mr. Speaker, I feel, and I have spoken on this before, we have tremendous potential here in the Northwest Territories because our resources are incredibly rich, incredibly of a huge, huge magnitude. I think once we get over the hurdles of our governance, then all of that can proceed to the benefit of the people of the Northwest Territories. We do have a great future here in the North. If we can achieve that, Mr. Speaker. It is mind-boggling because our population is small, yet our resources are so gigantic, our potential is so gigantic. Whether it is resources of oil, gas, and minerals, or fishing or forestry, which I spoke about this morning, we have the potential and we need to get on with getting land claims settled and self-government.
Mr. Speaker, I will be supporting the motion. I would like to make a side comment, and that is, on the first statement where it makes reference to Bill 15 "has created serious rifts amongst northern people", those statements have been made repeatedly during this session. I think it is time we move beyond that and get on with more positive statements. I start to believe it is not productive if we keep that style of rhetoric up. The reality is that Bill 15 is getting third reading today presumably and I think once it is passed, yes, there are issues that need to be resolved but to continually harp on the fact that there are rifts amongst communities, rifts amongst northern people, let us please be more positive, a little more upbeat about our potential. I think it is time that we started to do that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.