Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is for the Minister responsible for Education, the Honourable Jake Ootes. In April I wrote the Minister a letter about IBA recipients being penalized in their income support payments. I was told that it is the department's position that the IBA payments made to the people in the Dogrib region are the result of a private contractual arrangement between the Dogrib Treaty 11 and BHP. As such, they are considered as land claim dollars but considered also as an income, so it is deducted from the income payments and the people that were employed benefited from these payments. The people that were unemployed, on income support, were the ones that were losing out on what was rightfully theirs.
To that, I would like to ask the Minister, was the department's position as a result of legal opinion or was it simply the department's interpretation of impact benefit agreements?