Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to think that the statement reflects, in a profound way, a willingness to address the very stark realities that we have never clearly stated before.

The fact is for a number of years now, we have been seeing very low graduation rates in our schools, considering the couple of hundred million dollars we spend on education, building schools, staffing them, keeping them running, paying the teachers. The results we get for the amount of money we pay into schools is not acceptable and it has been like that for a number of years.

But, it is time to look at stark realities like that. We have said that we have other things that we need to address - the completely unacceptable level of alcohol consumption, drugs, and smoking in our communities. The profound way in which many of our families are slowly disintegrating, the number of child apprehensions, and the abuse suffered by our women and children and elders in communities. We cannot give comfort to our communities and our people and say that it is going to be business as usual. We have to give a message that we will not continue to spend money the way the previous Legislature has because we do not have time to get specific.

So we will come up with an interim appropriation in March for this Legislature to deal with. We have made a commitment, and we tried to start that in Fort Providence, to work to the maximum extent possible with every Member of the Legislature to set the priorities and goals of this Legislature, and to define a way in which we should set out to achieve those goals. We have said that we want to be as inclusive as possible to define those priorities and goals.

We said in Fort Providence that we want to include the aboriginal leaders, the chiefs, the Metis leaders, the Inuvialuit, the representatives of our aboriginal communities and our communities across the North, to tell us how they think we should run this government. What is it we should try to set out to do? We want to ask them how they want to work with us to address the needs that we have in our communities today. How can we work together to plan to improve things in a measurable way in the next four years?

Perhaps we can begin by defining a ten-year term on how we will collectively set common goals and objectives.

That is what the intent of my statement was. It was to signal to people in the North that we want to work, but we are just not going to keep everything running the same way it has and currently is. There are some changes that need to be made. Some of those need to be made in partnership with our communities and our regions.

This government is not going to dictate the changes unilaterally. We are starting to articulate the things that we see that need to be addressed. We have not yet started to articulate how we are going to address those changes except to say that the first order of business is to invite aboriginal leaders to sit with us to discuss whether or not they agree on the work that we see ahead of us, to seek agreement with them on how to approach the work and to get consensus that the only way we can address problems at the community level, the regional level, the territorial level is by working together. Once we get that realization and that agreement, I think we can look forward to addressing some of the very fundamental needs that we have in our communities today. Thank you.