Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would say on the head of a pin. This is my first attempt to be funny in two weeks.
---- Laughter
Mr. Speaker, whether we have three departments all dealing with separate and different mandates, in the end it needs to come together. We need to balance the environment with our need for economic development. We need to take wildlife, land, water, air issues and balance them with our need to support job creation through diamond mines, and oil and gas development. We had an extensive discussion about this for a number of years. We have consulted experts, people from different parts of the country. Can you take a department of environment, for instance, and a department of wildlife and put them in the same department as the Department for Economic Development responsible for non-renewable resources, and I believe the answer generally was, it can be done as long as it is managed properly.
The point of it is, in the end, it really needs to go and be brought to be the same table. What we have found is that it gave us an opportunity to develop a department and a staff that take an integrated approach to their work so that they are not just bound by thinking about mallards or just about wolverines, but also about diamonds, about water, about habitat and protected area strategy, about an economic development strategy so that all the staff in the department take an integrated approach to the mandates that the department is charged with. It has worked well.
The exercise was also taken because we needed to reduce staff and resources at the headquarters level of which we have heard a little bit about recently. Originally there were three departments: Economic Development and Tourism; Energy Mines and Petroleum Resources; and the Department of Renewable Resources. By taking the three departments and, as somebody said, smashing them into one, we saved $10 million. Ten million dollars was cut out of Yellowknife, primarily out of Yellowknife, and that was the reduction exercise we made. It was not pleasant. It was not pretty, but it was done. There is no interest, I can tell you categorically, there is no interest on the part of this government to take what is now one department, that appears to be running very well, and making two departments out of it. We do not have the money. It would cost, $1 million, $2 million, $10 million to set up another department, simply to address a question that was addressed a number of years ago already. Thank you.