Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will make my comments short so Mr. Handley can call detail again. I will address the opening remarks by Mr. Handley in the areas of priorities set by this government. I believe our budget reflects some of it but our budget really reflects the fiscal reality that we live in today. It would have been nice to see a real, good budget, but not having the money does not allow us to do that. In terms of building partnerships and development capacity, the support for these building capacities and partnerships are important, I believe. I believe it is incumbent upon all of us individual MLAs to work with our communities in getting prepared for the future. The document, The Strategy For Non-Renewable Resource Development, I went through it very carefully, and I think it is a very good document. I shared that document with people in the resource development sector. The responses that I got were very positive. I know the intention of that document, if it goes through, and we start seeing the financial gains from the development of our non-renewable resource sector, is to use those funds to help pay for the diversified Northwest Territories economy as we speak. That may be a few years away, but I do not think we can sit back and wait for that to happen.

We need to work with the regions, the communities, the leaderships, at all levels of government throughout the Northwest Territories and help to prepare our communities so that once we are able to develop a pipeline and get more into the mining sector, that when we start seeing money that they are prepared to take advantage of those revenues, as groups of peoples who are independent and arms-length from government. I do not see the funds available in the budget for that kind of support. I am hoping that the Minister and the deputy minister will be able to find some funds in order to assist communities and regions in preparing and building capacity within the regions. I am personally going to work with my communities doing just that; looking at, for example, tourism associations for my region. I may include some other communities outside of my region, but we are going to need help. We are going to need resources to set up the people, the offices, and what we are going to do, et cetera. Not only that, there will be areas to work with resources companies in partnership with community and government, to set up offices where people could go and apply for employment or business opportunities, et cetera. But we need financial resources to get those going.

The communities and local aboriginal governments just do not have the cash. Resource companies have the cash but they like to see in-kind services, basically, from other partners. I will do my part in achieving the goals that we set for ourselves for a better tomorrow. I think those are good achievable goals that the people of the Northwest Territories will support. However, having said that, we need to build towards it, not wait until we get there before we start building. We need to build starting today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.